• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.180-186
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• 2004

The presence of noise in speech signals degrades the performance of recognition systems in which there are mismatches between the training and test environments. To make a speech recognizer robust, it is necessary to compensate these mismatches. In this paper, we studied about an improvement of stochastic feature extraction based on band-SNR for robust speech recognition. At first, we proposed a modified version of the multi-band spectral subtraction (MSS) method which adjusts the subtraction level of noise spectrum according to band-SNR. In the proposed method referred as M-MSS, a noise normalization factor was newly introduced to finely control the over-estimation factor depending on the band-SNR. Also, we modified the architecture of the stochastic feature extraction (SFE) method. We could get a better performance when the spectral subtraction was applied in the power spectrum domain than in the mel-scale domain. This method is denoted as M-SFE. Last, we applied the M-MSS method to the modified stochastic feature extraction structure, which is denoted as the MMSS-MSFE method. The proposed methods were evaluated on isolated word recognition under various noise environments. The average error rates of the M-MSS, M-SFE, and MMSS-MSFE methods over the ordinary spectral subtraction (SS) method were reduced by 18.6%, 15.1%, and 33.9%, respectively. From these results, we can conclude that the proposed methods provide good candidates for robust feature extraction in the noisy speech recognition.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.101-107
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• 2011

The background noises and distortions by channel are major factors that disturb the practical use of speech recognition. Usually, noise reduce the performance of speech recognition system DSR(Distributed Speech Recognition) based speech recognition also bas difficulty of improving performance for this reason. Therefore, to improve DSR-based speech recognition under noisy environment, this paper proposes a method which detects accurate speech region to extract accurate features. The proposed method distinguish speech and noise by using entropy and detection of spectral energy of speech. The speech detection by the spectral energy of speech shows good performance under relatively high SNR(SNR 15dB). But when the noise environment varies, the threshold between speech and noise also varies, and speech detection performance reduces under low SNR(SNR 0dB) environment. The proposed method uses the spectral entropy and harmonics of speech for better speech detection. Also, the performance of AFE is increased by precise speech detections. According to the result of experiment, the proposed method shows better recognition performance under noise environment.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.219-233
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• 1999

This paper presents a real-time implementation of a speaker independent speech recognition system based on a discrete hidden markov model(DHMM). This system is developed for a car navigation system to design on-chip VLSI system of speech recognition which is used by fixed point Oak DSP core of DSP GROUP LTD. We analyze recognition procedure with C language to implement fixed point real-time algorithms. Based on the analyses, we improve the algorithms which are possible to operate in real-time, and can verify the recognition result at the same time as speech ends, by processing all recognition routines within a frame. A car noise is the colored noise concentrated heavily on the low frequency segment under 400 Hz. For the noise robust processing, the high pass filtering and the liftering on the distance measure of feature vectors are applied to the recognition system. Recognition experiments on the twelve isolated command words were performed. The recognition rates of the baseline recognizer were 98.68% in a stopping situation and 80.7% in a running situation. Using the noise processing methods, the recognition rates were enhanced to 89.04% in a running situation.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.251-261
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• 2003

There has been many research efforts to overcome the problems of speech recognition in noisy conditions. Among the noise-robust speech recognition methods, model-based adaptation approaches have been shown quite effective. Particularly, the PMC (parallel model combination) method is very popular and has been shown to give considerably improved recognition results compared with the conventional methods. In this paper, we experimented with the VTS (vector Taylor series) algorithm which is also based on the model parameter transformation but has not attracted much interests of the researchers in this area. To verify the effectiveness of it, we employed the algorithm in the continuous density HMM (Hidden Markov Model). We compared the performance of the VTS algorithm with the PMC method and could see that the it gave better results than the PMC method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.21-26
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• 2001

An expectation-maximization (EM) based Bayesian adaptation method for the mean of noise is proposed for noise-robust speech recognition. In the algorithm, the on-line testing utterances are used for the unsupervised Bayesian adaptation and the prior distribution of the noise mean is estimated using the off-line training data. For the noisy speech modeling, the parallel model combination (PMC) method is employed. The proposed method has shown to be effective compared with the conventional PMC method for the speech recognition experiments in a car-noise condition.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.43-52
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• 2004

This paper concerns an effective dual-channel noise reduction method to increase the performance of speech recognition in a car environment. While various single channel methods have already been developed and dual-channel methods have been studied somewhat, their effectiveness in real environments, such as in cars, has not yet been formally proven in terms of achieving acceptable performance level. Our aim is to remedy the low performance of the single and dual-channel noise reduction methods. This paper proposes an effective dual-channel noise reduction method based on a high-pass filter and front-end processing of the eigendecomposition method. We experimented with a real multi-channel car database and compared the results with respect to the microphones arrangements. From the analysis and results, we show that the enhanced eigendecomposition method combined with high-pass filter indeed significantly improve the speech recognition performance under a dual-channel environment.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.28-34
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• 2003

Recent researches have been focusing on jointly using lip motions (i.e. visual speech) and speech for reliable speech recognitions in noisy environments. This paper also deals with the method of combining the result of the visual speech recognizer and that of the conventional speech recognizer through putting weights on each result: the paper proposes the method of determining proper weights for each result and, in particular, the weights are autonomously determined, depending on the amounts of noise in the speech and the image quality. Simulation results show that combining the audio and visual recognition by the proposed method provides the recognition performance of 84% even in severely noisy environments. It is also shown that in the presence of blur in images, the newly proposed weighting method, which takes the blur into account as well, yields better performance than the other methods.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.865-867
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• 2008

A conventional environment adaptation for robust speech recognition is usually conducted using transform-based techniques. Here, we present a discriminative adaptation strategy based on a multi-condition-trained model, and propose a new method to provide universal application to a new environment using the environment's specific conditions. Experimental results show that a speech recognition system adapted using the proposed method works successfully for other conditions as well as for those of the new environment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.11-16
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• 2013

This paper proposes robust feature extraction for accurate voice activity detection (VAD). VAD is one of the principal modules for speech signal processing such as speech codec, speech enhancement, and speech recognition. Noisy environments contain nonstationary noises causing the accuracy of the VAD to drastically decline because the fluctuation of features in the noise intervals results in increased false alarm rates. In this paper, in order to improve the VAD performance, harmonic-weighted energy is proposed. This feature extraction method focuses on voiced speech intervals and weighted harmonic-to-noise ratios to determine the amount of the harmonicity to frame energy. For performance evaluation, the receiver operating characteristic curves and equal error rate are measured.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.252-261
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• 2013

The common speech recognition system displays higher recognition performance in a quiet environment, while its performance declines sharply in a real environment where there are noises. To implement a speech recognizer that is robust in different speech settings, this study suggests the method of Parallel Model Combination adaptation using frequency-variant based on environment-awareness (FV-PMC), which uses variants in frequency; acquires the environmental data for speech recognition; applies it to upgrading the speech recognition model; and promotes its performance enhancement. This FV-PMC performs the speech recognition with the recognition model which is generated as followings: i) calculating the average frequency variant in advance among the readily-classified noise groups and setting it as a threshold value; ii) recalculating the frequency variant among noise groups when speech with unknown noises are input; iii) regarding the speech higher than the threshold value of the relevant group as the speech including the noise of its group; and iv) using the speech that includes this noise group. When noises were classified with the proposed FV-PMC, the average accuracy of classification was 56%, and the results from the speech recognition experiments showed the average recognition rate of Set A was 79.05%, the rate of Set B 79.43%m, and the rate of Set C 83.37% respectively. The grand mean of recognition rate was 80.62%, which demonstrates 5.69% more improved effects than the recognition rate of 74.93% of the existing Parallel Model Combination with a clear model, meaning that the proposed method is effective.