• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.286-292
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• 2003

Voice activity detection (VAD) is a process that separates the noise region from silence or noise region of input speech signal. Since unvoiced consonant signals have very similar characteristics to those of noise signals, it may result in serious distortion of unvoiced consonants, or in erroneous noise estimation to can out VAD without paying special attention on unvoiced consonants. In this paper, we propose a method to extract in an explicit way the boundaries between unvoiced consonant and noise in fluent speech so that more exact VAD could be performed. The proposed method is based on histogram in frequency domain which was successfully used by Hirsch for noise estimation, and a1so on similarity measure of frequency components between adjacent frames, To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments on unvoiced consonant boundary extraction was performed on seven kinds of noisy speech signals of 10 ㏈ and 15 ㏈ SNR respectively.