• 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 Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.312-323
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• 2014

Voice activity detection is very important process that find voice activity from noisy speech signal for noise cancelling and speech enhancement. Over the past few years, many studies have been made on voice activity detection, it has poor performance for speech signal of sentence form in a low SNR environment. In this paper, it proposed new voice activity detection algorithm that has beginning VAD process using entropy and main VAD process using fuzzy membership shifted c-means clustering. We conduct an experiment in various SNR environment of white noise to evaluate performance of the proposed algorithm and confirmed good performance of the proposed algorithm.

• 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.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.768-774
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• 2008

In many areas of speech signal processing such as automatic speech recognition and packet based voice communication technique, VAD (voice activity detection) plays an important role in the performance of the overall system. In this paper, we present a new feature parameter for VAD which is the product of energy of the signal and the difference of two types of entropies. For this end, we first define a Mel filter-bank based entropy and calculate its difference from the conventional entropy in frequency domain. The difference is then multiplied by the spectral energy of the signal to yield the final feature parameter which we call PEED (product of energy and entropy difference). Through experiments. we could verify that the proposed VAD parameter is more efficient than the conventional spectral entropy based parameter in various SNRs and noisy environments.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.447-453
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• 2009

This paper introduces the method for detect voices and exact end point at low SNR by maximizing voice energy. Conventional VAD (Voice Activity Detection) algorithm estimates noise level so it tends to detect the end point inaccurately. Moreover, because it uses relatively long analysis range for reflecting temporal change of noise, computing load too high for application. In this paper, the SEM-VAD (Speech Energy Maximization-Voice Activity Detection) method which uses psycho-acoustical bark scale filter banks to maximize voice energy within frames is introduced. Stable threshold values are obtained at various noise environments (SNR 15 dB, 10 dB, 5 dB, 0 dB). At the test for voice detection in car noisy environment, PHR (Pause Hit Rate) was 100%accurate at every noise environment, and FAR (False Alarm Rate) shows 0% at SNR15 dB and 10 dB, 5.6% at SNR5 dB and 9.5% at SNR0 dB.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.8C
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• pp.661-666
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• 2010

In this paper, we apply a likelihood ratio test (LRT) to a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) based voice activity detection (VAD) to find optimal threshold. In our approach, the NMF based VAD is expressed as Euclidean distance between noise basis vector and input basis vector which are extracted through NMF. The optimal threshold each of noise environments depend on NMF results distribution in noise region which is estimated statistical model-based VAD. According to the experimental results, the proposed approach is found to be effective for statistical model-based VAD using LRT.

• 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.

• 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 Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.373-377
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• 2017

This paper presents a voice-activity detection (VAD) method for sound sequences with various SNRs. For real-time VAD applications, it is inadequate to employ a post-processing for the removal of burst clippings from the VAD output decision. To tackle this problem, building on the bi-level hidden Markov model, for which a state layer is inserted into a typical hidden Markov model (HMM), we formulated a robust method for VAD not requiring any additional post-processing. In the method, a forward-inference-ratio test was devised to detect the speech endpoints and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) were used as the features. Our experiment results show that, regarding different SNRs, the performance of the proposed approach is more outstanding than those of the conventional methods.