• 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.

• MALSORI
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• no.50
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• pp.139-150
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• 2004

A Phonetic Tied-Mixture (PTM) model has been proposed as a way of efficient decoding in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems (LVCSR). It has been reported that PTM model shows better performance in decoding than triphones by sharing a set of mixture components among states of the same topological location[5]. In this paper we propose a Phonetic Tied-Mixture Syllable (PTMS) model which extends PTM technique up to syllables. The proposed PTMS model shows 13% enhancement in decoding speed than PTM. In spite of difference in context dependent modeling (PTM : cross-word context dependent modeling, PTMS : word-internal left-phone dependent modeling), the proposed model shows just less than 1% degradation in word accuracy than PTM with the same beam width. With a different beam width, it shows better word accuracy than in PTM at the same or higher speed.

• MALSORI
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• no.48
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• pp.81-91
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a speech recognition method based on independent component analysis (ICA) and spectral enhancement techniques. While ICA tris to separate speech signal from noisy speech using multiple channels, some noise remains by its algorithmic limitations. Spectral enhancement techniques can compensate for lack of ICA's signal separation ability. From the speech recognition experiments with instantaneous and convolved mixing environments, we show that the proposed approach gives much improved recognition accuracies than conventional methods.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.187-190
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• 2002

In this paper, a speech enhancement system using microphone array with MMSE-STSA (Minimum Mean Square Error-Short Time Spectral Amplitude) estimator based post-processing is proposed. Speech enhancement is first carried out by conventional delay-and-sum beamforming (DSB). A new MMSE-STSA estimator is then obtained by refining MMSE-STSA estimators from each microphone, which is applied to the output of conventional DSB to obtain additional speech enhancement. Computer simulation for white and pink noises show that the proposed system is superior to other approaches.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.153-164
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• 2006

The MMSE-STSA based speech enhancement algorithm is widely used as a preprocessing for noise robust speech recognition. It weighs the gain of each spectral bin of the noisy speech using the estimate of noise and signal power spectrum. In this paper, we investigate the influence of parameters used to estimate the speech signal and noise power in MMSE-STSA upon the recognition performance of noisy speech. For experiments, we use the Aurora2 DB which contains noisy speech with subway, babble, car, and exhibition noises. The HTK-based continuous HMM system is constructed for recognition experiments. Experimental results are presented and discussed with our findings.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.153-170
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• 2007

It is well known that when there is an acoustic mismatch between the speech obtained during training and testing, the accuracy of speaker verification systems drastically deteriorates. This paper presents the use of MFCCs' histogram enhancement technique in order to improve the robustness of a speaker verification system. The technique transforms the features extracted from speech within an utterance such that their statistics conform to reference distributions. The reference distributions proposed in this paper are uniform distribution and beta distribution. The transformation modifies the contrast of MFCCs' histogram so that the performance of a speaker verification system is improved both in the clean training and testing environment and in the clean training and noisy testing environment.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.41-44
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• 2002

This paper is related to the enhancement of speech recognition rate using enhanced pronunciation dictionary. Modern large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition systems have pronunciation dictionaries. A pronunciation dictionary provides pronunciation information for each word in the vocabulary in phonemic units, which are modeled in detail by the acoustic models. But in most speech recognition system based on Hidden Markov Model, actual pronunciation variations are disregarded. Without the pronunciation variations in the speech recognition system, the phonetic transcriptions in the dictionary do not match the actual occurrences in the database. In this paper, we proposed the unvoiced rule of semivowel in allophone rules to pronunciation dictionary. Experimental results on speech recognition system give higher performance than existing pronunciation dictionaries.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.207-210
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• 2003

In this paper, the combinations of speech enhancement techniques are experimented. Specifically, the spectral subtraction, KLT based comb-filtering, and their combinations are applied to the Aurora2 database. The results show that recognition accuracy is improved when KLT based comb-filtering is applied after spectral subtraction.

• MALSORI
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• no.60
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• pp.181-190
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• 2006

This paper describes a speech enhancement scheme that leads to significant improvements in recognition performance when used in the ASR front-end. The proposed approach is based on adaptive comb filtering and an MMSE-related parameter estimator. While adaptive comb filtering reduces noise components remarkably, it is rarely effective in reducing non-stationary noises. Furthermore, due to the uniformly distributed frequency response of the comb-filter, it can cause serious distortion to clean speech signals. This paper proposes an improved comb-filter that adjusts its spectral magnitude to the original speech, based on the speech absence probability and the gain modification function. In addition, we introduce the modified comb filtering-based speech enhancement scheme for ASR in mobile environments. Evaluation experiments carried out using the Aurora 2 database demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional adaptive comb filtering techniques in both clean and noisy environments.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.24-29
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• 2014

Digital mammography is the most common technique for the early detection of breast cancer. To diagnose the breast cancer in early stages and treat efficiently, many image enhancement methods have been developed. This paper presents a multi-scale contrast enhancement method in the Laplacian pyramid for the digital mammogram. The proposed method decomposes the image into the contrast measures by the Gaussian and Laplacian pyramid, and the pyramid coefficients of decomposed multi-resolution image are defined as the frequency limited local contrast measures by the ratio of high frequency components and low frequency components. The decomposed pyramid coefficients are modified by the contrast measure for enhancing the contrast, and the final enhanced image is obtained by the composition process of the pyramid using the modified coefficients. The proposed method is compared with other existing methods, and demonstrated to have quantitatively good performance in the contrast measure algorithm.