• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.529-534
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• 2009

One of the characteristics of the hearing impaired is that their frequency selectivity is poorer than that of the normal hearing. To compensate this, formant enhancement algorithms and spectral contrast enhancement algorithms have been developed. However in some cases, these algorithms fail to improve the frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired. One of the reasons is the acoustic masking among enhanced formants. In this study, we tried to enhance the formants based on the individual masking characteristic of each subject. The masking characteristic used in this study was minimum level difference (MLD) between the first formant to the second formant while acoustic masking was occurred. If the level difference between the two formants in each frame is larger than the MLD, the gain of the first formant was decreased to reduce the acoustic masking that occurred among formants. As a result of the speech discrimination test, using formant enhanced speeches, speech discrimination score (SDS) of the speeches having differently enhanced formants was significantly superior to SDS of the speeches having equally enhanced formants. It means that suppression of the acoustic masking among formants improve frequency selectivity of the hearing impaired.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.749-758
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• 2019

This paper proposes a data augmentation algorithm to improve the performance of DNN(Deep Neural Network) based speech enhancement. Many deep learning models are exploring algorithms to maximize the performance in limited amount of data. The most commonly used algorithm is the data augmentation which is the technique artificially increases the amount of data. For the effective data augmentation algorithm, we used a formant enhancement method that assign the different weights to the formant frequencies. The DNN model which is trained using the proposed data augmentation algorithm was evaluated in various noise environments. The speech enhancement performance of the DNN model with the proposed data augmentation algorithm was compared with the algorithms which are the DNN model with the conventional data augmentation and without the data augmentation. As a result, the proposed data augmentation algorithm showed the higher speech enhancement performance than the other algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.13-20
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• 2008

Although digital hearing aid algorithms have been developed to compensate hearing loss and to help hearing impaired people to communicate with others, digital hearing aid user still complain about difficulty of hearing the speech. The reason could be the quality of speech through digital hearing aid is insufficient to understand the speech caused by feedback, residual noise and etc. And another thing is masking effect among formants that makes sound quality low. In this study, we measured the masking characteristics of normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners having presbyacusis to confirm masking effect in speech itself. The experiment is composed of 5 tests; pure tone test, speech reception threshold (SRT) test, word recognition score (WRS) test, puretone masking test and speech masking test. In speech masking test, there are 25 speeches in each speech set. And log likelihood ratio (LLR) is introduced to evaluate the distortion of each speech objectively. As a result, the speech perception became lower by increasing the quantity of formant enhancement. And each enhanced speech in a speech set has statistically similar LLR, however speech perception is not. It means that acoustic masking effect rather than distortion influences speech perception. In actuality, according to the result of frequency analysis of the speech that people can not answer correctly, level difference between first formant and second formant is about 35dB, and it is similar to result of pure tone masking test(normal hearing subject:36.36dB, hearing impaired subject:32.86dB). Characteristics of masking effect is not similar between normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners. So it is required to check the characteristics of masking effect before wearing a hearing aid and to apply this characteristics to fitting.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.122-125
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• 2011

In real environment, background noise exists everywhere and degrades the performance of system. To reduce this distortion, a speech enhancement algorithm can be very useful and variety methods have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a postfilter to improve the performance of optimally modified log-spectral amplitude (OM-LSA) estimator. Proposed algorithm uses the formant postfilter to minimize perceptual distortion caused by background noise. We adjust an emphasizing parameter which is varied by spectral flatness and first reflection coefficient. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by measuring the log-spectral distance (LSD) and the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) score. The test results show the improvement of proposed algorithm compared to conventional OM-LSA.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.06e
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• pp.411-414
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• 1998

음성의 음질 향상(Speech Enhancement)을 위한 여러 가지 방법 중에서 주파수 차감법(Spectral Subtraction)은 계산량이 적기 때문에 현재 실시간으로 Speech Enhancement를 할 수 있는 가장 적절한 방법이다. 그러나, 이 방법은 원래의 입력음성에 없던 새로운 잡음을 만들어내는 큰 단점이 있는데, 이를 제거하기 위해 많은 연구가 되어오고 있다. 이러한 연구의 방향은 대부분 주변프레임 또는 주변의 주파수 성분과의 평균을 통해 피크값을 무디게 해 줌으로써 새로 생긴 튀는 잡음을 감소시키는 것이다. 이런 방법은 음성자체의 정보 또한 평균이 되어버리게 하는 새로운 단점을 낳는데, 이런 현상은 무성음구간에서 특히 심각해진다. 본 논문에서는 입력음성의 LPC 분석으로 백색필터(Whitening Filter)를 구성하여 이를 통과시킨 잔류신호(Residual)를 주파수 차감하여 얻은 새로운 잔류신호를 역 필터링하여(Synthesis Filter) 개선된 음성을 얻는 방법을 제안하였다. 제안된 알고리듬은, 주파수 차감시 포만트(Formant)의 정보가 더 유지 될 수 있기 때문에 잔류잡음을 줄일 수 있다. 청취 테스트 결과 제안한 방법이 기존의 방법보다 잔류잡음을 더 줄이는 사실을 확인할 수 있었다.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2007

In most of hearing aids, amplification algorithms are used to compensate hearing loss, noise and feedback reduction algorithms are used and to increase the perception of speeches contrast enhancement algorithms are used. However, acoustic masking effect is occurred between formants if contrast is enhanced excessively. To confirm the masking effect in speeches, the experiment are composed of 6 tests; test pure tone test, speech reception test, word recognition test, pure tone masking test, formant pure tone masking test and speech masking test, and for objective evaluation, LLR is introduced. As a result of normal hearing subjects and hearing impaired subjects, more making is occurred in hearing impaired subjects than normal hearing subjects when using pure tone, and in the speech masking test, speech reception is also lower in hearing impaired subjects than in normal hearing subjects. This means that acoustic masking effect rather than distortion influences speech perception. So it is required to check the characteristics of masking effect before wearing a hearing aid and to apply this characteristics to fitting curve.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.47-63
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• 2010

This study provides a description of the glottal characteristics of the word-initial low vowels /a, $\ae$/ in terms of a set of acoustic parameters and discusses glottal configuration as their acoustic correlates. Furthermore, it examines the effect of prosodic boundary on the glottal properties of the vowels, seeking an account of the possible role of prosodic structure based on prosodic theory. Acoustic parameters reported to indicate glottal characteristics were obtained from the measurements made directly from the speech spectrum on recordings of Korean and English collected from 45 speakers. They consist of two separate groups of native Korean and native English speakers, each including both male and female speakers. Based on the three acoustic parameters of open quotient (OQ), first-formant bandwidth (B1), and spectral tilt (ST), comparisons were made between the speech of males and females, between the speech of native Korean and native English speakers, and between Korean and English produced by native Korean speakers. Acoustic analysis of the experimental data indicates that some or all glottal parameters play a crucial role in differentiating the speech groups, despite substantial interspeaker variations. Statistical analysis of the Korean data indicates prosodic strengthening with respect to the acoustic parameters B1 and OQ, suggesting acoustic enhancement in terms of the degree of glottal abduction and the glottal closure during a vibratory cycle.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.9-17
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• 2012

One of the problems on the application of the speech recognition system in the real world is the degradation of the performance by acoustical distortions. The most important source of acoustical distortion is the additive noise. This paper describes a spectral compensation technique based on a spectral peak enhancement scheme followed by an efficient noise subtraction scheme for noise robust speech recognition. The proposed methods emphasize the formant structure and compensate the spectral tilt of the speech spectrum while maintaining broad-bandwidth spectral components. The recognition experiments was conducted using noisy speech corrupted by white Gaussian noise, car noise, babble noise or subway noise. The new technique reduced the average error rate slightly under high SNR(Signal to Noise Ratio) environment, and significantly reduced the average error rate by 1/2 under low SNR(10 dB) environment when compared with the case of without spectral compensations.