• ETRI Journal
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.451-453
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• 2009

This letter proposes the use of vowel sound detection for voice activity detection. Vowels have distinctive spectral peaks. These are likely to remain higher than their surroundings even after severe corruption. Therefore, by developing a method of detecting the spectral peaks of vowel sounds in corrupted signals, voice activity can be detected as well even in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs reliably under various noise and low SNR conditions. This method is suitable for mobile environments where the characteristics of noise may not be known in advance.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.95-105
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• 2003

This paper describes a new parameter for voice activity detection which serves as a front-end part for automatic speech recognition systems. The new parameter called run-ratio is derived from the runs test statistic which is used in the statistical test for randomness of a given sequence. The run-ratio parameter has the property that the values of the parameter for the random sequence are about 1. To apply the run-ratio parameter into the voice activity detection method, it is assumed that the samples of an inputted audio signal should be converted to binary sequences of positive and negative values. Then, the silence region in the audio signal can be regarded as random sequences so that their values of the run-ratio would be about 1. The run-ratio for the voiced region has far lower values than 1 and for fricative sounds higher values than 1. Therefore, the parameter can discriminate speech signals from the background sounds by using the newly derived run-ratio parameter. The proposed voice activity detector outperformed the conventional energy-based detector in the sense of error mean and variance, small deviation from true speech boundaries, and low chance of missing real utterances

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.249-255
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• 2016

Since the elderly voices include a lot of noise caused by physiological changes in respiration, phonation, and resonance, the performance of the convergence health-care equipments such as speech recognition, synthesis, analysis program done by elderly voice is deteriorated. Therefore it is necessary to develop researches to operate health-care instruments with elderly voices. In this study, a voice activity detection using a symmetric higher-order differential energy function (SHODEO) was developed and was compared with auto-correlation function(ACF) and the average magnitude difference function(AMDF). It was confirmed to have a better performance than other methods in the voice interval detection. The voice activity detection will be applied to a voice interface for the elderly to improve the accessibility of the smart devices.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.1064-1069
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of a voice activity detection(VAD) which is based on the adaptive band-partitioning with the likelihood ratio(LR). The previous method based on the adaptive band-partitioning use the weights that are derived from the variance of the spectral. In our VAD algorithm, the weights are derived from LR, and then the weights are incorporated with the entropy. The proposed algorithm discriminates the voice activity by comparing the weighted entropy with the adaptive threshold. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional VAD algorithms. Especially, the proposed algorithm shows superior improvement in non-stationary noise environments.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.437-442
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• 2015

Voice activity detection is very important process that voice activity separated form noisy speech signal for speech enhance. Over the past few years, many studies have been made on voice activity detection, but it has poor performance in low signal to noise ratio environment or fickle noise such as car noise. In this paper, it proposed new voice activity detection algorithm using ensemble variance based on wavelet band entropy and soft thresholding method. We conduct a survey in a lot of signal to noise ratio environment of car noise to evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm and confirmed performance of the proposed algorithm.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.26-30
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• 2019

This paper proposes a new voice activity detection (VAD) method which is based on SNR and non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation. In the conventional SNR-based VAD methods, voice activity probability is obtained by estimating frame-wise SNR at each spectral component. However these methods lack performance in various noisy environments. We devise a hybrid VAD method that uses non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation as well as SNR estimation, where the speech intelligibility score is estimated based on deep neural network. In order to train model parameters of deep neural network, we use MFCC vector and the intrusive speech intelligibility score, STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligent Measure), as input and output, respectively. We developed speech presence measure to classify each noisy frame as voice or non-voice by calculating the weighted average of the estimated STOI value and the conventional SNR-based VAD value at each frame. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional VAD method in various noisy environments, especially when the SNR is very low.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.145-150
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to improve the performance of a voice activity detection(VAD) which is based on the deep belief networks(DBN) with the likelihood ratio(LR). The proposed algorithm applies the DBN learning method which is trained in order to minimize the probability of detection error instead of the conventional decision rule using geometric mean. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional VAD algorithm in various noise environments.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.310-315
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• 2015

A single channel VAD (Voice Activity Detection) algorithm for nonstationary noise environment is proposed in this paper. Threshold values of the feature parameter for VAD decision are updated adaptively based on estimates of means and standard deviations of past non-speech frames. The feature parameter, SPD-TE (Spectral Power Difference-Teager Energy), is obtained by applying the Teager energy to the WPD (Wavelet Packet Decomposition) coefficients. It was reported previously that the SPD-TE is robust to noise as a feature for VAD. Experimental results by using TIMIT speech and NOISEX-92 noise databases show that decision accuracy of the proposed algorithm is comparable to several typical VAD algorithms including standards for SNR values ranging from 10 to -10 dB.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.324-329
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of a statistical model-based voice activity detection (VAD) which is based on the conditional maximum a posteriori (CMAP) with deviation. In our approach, the VAD decision rule is expressed as the geometric mean of likelihood ratios (LRs) based on adapted threshold according to the speech presence probability conditioned on both the speech activity decisions and spectral deviation in the pervious frame. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields better results compared to the CMAP-based VAD using the LR test.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.76-81
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of a statistical model-based voice activity detection (VAD) which is based on the second-order conditional maximum a posteriori (CMAP). In our approach, the VAD decision rule is expressed as the geometric mean of likelihood ratios (LRs) based on adapted threshold according to the speech presence probability conditioned on both the current observation and the speech activity decisions in the pervious two frames. Experimental results show that the proposed approach yields better results compared to the statistical model-based and the CMAP-based VAD using the LR test.