• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.61-67
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• 2000

Recent progress in digital and VLSI technology has offered new possibility fer noticeable advance of hearing aids. Yet, environmental noise remains one of the major problems to hearing aid users. This paper describes results which speech recognition performance and speech discrimination performance was measured for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss, while listeners in speech-band noise. In addition, to ameliorate hearing-aided environments of hearing impaired listeners, environmental noise reduction using speech enhancement techniques are investigated as a front-end of conventional hearing aids. Speech enhancement techniques are implemented in a realtime system equipped with DSP board. The clinical test results suggest that the speech enhancement technique may work in synergy with gain functions fer the greater SNR improvement as the preprocessing algorithm of digital hearing aids.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1665-1674
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• 2011

In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for speech enhancement of speeches corrupted by colored noise. When there is no correlation between colored noise and speech signal, the colored noise turns into white noise through whitening transformation. This transformed signal has been applied to the generalized subspace approach for speech enhancement. The speech spectral distortion, produced by the whitening transformation as pre-processing, has been restored by using the inverse whitening transformation as post-processing of the proposed algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm for speech enhancement has been confirmed by computer simulation. The colored noises used in this experiment were car noise and multi-talker babble. It is confirmed that the proposed algorithm shows better performance from SNR and SSD viewpoint over the previous approach with the data from the AURORA and TIMIT data base.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.540-547
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• 2004

Since speech enhancement algorithms based on Kalman/Wiener filter require a priori knowledge of the noise and have focused on the minimization of the variance of the estimation error between clean and estimated speech signal, small estimation error on the noise statistics may lead to large estimation error. However, H/sub ∞/ filter does not require any assumptions and a priori knowledge of the noise statistics, but searches the best estimated signal among the entire estimated signal by applying least upper bound, consequently it is more robust to the variation of noise statistics than Kalman/Wiener filter. In this paper, we Propose a speech enhancement method using HMM and multi H/sub ∞/ filters. First, HMM parameters are estimated with the training data. Secondly, speech is filtered with multiple number of H/sub ∞/ filters. Finally, the estimation of clean speech is obtained from the sum of the weighted filtered outputs. Experimental results shows about 1dB∼2dB SNR improvement with a slight increment of computation compared with the Kalman filter method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.416-422
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• 2005

Speech recognition in digital communication systems has very low performance due to the spectral distortion caused by speech codecs. In this paper, the spectral distortion by speech codecs is analyzed and a pre-processing method which compensates for the spectral distortion is proposed for performance enhancement of speech recognition. Three standard speech codecs. IS-127 EVRC. ITU G.729 CS-ACELP and IS-96 QCELP. are considered for algorithm development and evaluation, and a single method which can be applied commonly to all codecs is developed. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for three codecs, and by using the speech features extracted from the compensated spectrum. the recognition rate is improved by the maximum of $15.6\%$ compared with that using the degraded speech features.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.11C
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• pp.1161-1168
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose an improved statistical model-based voice activity detection algorithm and threshold update method. We first improve signal-to-noise ratio by using speech enhancement preprocessing algorithm combined power subtraction method and matched filter, then apply it to LLR test optimum decision rule for improving the performance even in low SNR conditions. And we propose an adaptive threshold update method that was not concerned in any papers. We also perform extensive computer simulations to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed VAD algorithm employing the proposed speech enhancement preprocessing algorithm and adaptive threshold update method under various background noise environments. Finally we verify our results by comparing ITU-T G.729 Annex B.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.8
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• pp.383-388
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• 2006

This Paper presents a novel approach to single channel microphone speech enhancement in noisy environments. Widely used noise reduction techniques based on the spectral subtraction are generally expressed as a spectral gam depending on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The well-known decision-directed(DD) estimator of Ephraim and Malah efficiently reduces musical noise under the background noise conditions, but generates the delay of the a prioiri SNR because the DD weights the speech spectrum component of the Previous frame in the speech signal. Therefore, the noise suppression gain which is affected by the delay of the a priori SNR, which is estimated by the DD matches the previous frame rather than the current one, so after noise suppression. this degrades the noise reduction performance during speech transient periods. We propose a computationally simple but effective speech enhancement technique based on the sigmoid type function for the weight Parameter of the DD. The proposed approach solves the delay problem about the main parameter, the a priori SNR of the DD while maintaining the benefits of the DD. Performances of the proposed enhancement algorithm are evaluated by ITU-T p.862 Perceptual Evaluation of Speech duality (PESQ). the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the speech spectrogram under various noise environments and yields better results compared with the fixed weight parameter of the DD.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.234-240
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• 2021

In this paper, the mask-based speech enhancement is improved for effective speech recognition in noise environments. In the mask-based speech enhancement, enhanced spectrum is obtained by multiplying the noisy speech spectrum by the mask. The VoiceFilter (VF) model is used as the mask estimation, and the Spectrogram Inpainting (SI) technique is used to remove residual noise of enhanced spectrum. In this paper, we propose a combined loss to further improve speech enhancement. In order to effectively remove the residual noise in the speech, the positive part of the Triplet loss is used with the component loss. For the experiment TIMIT database is re-constructed using NOISEX92 noise and background music samples with various Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) are used as the metrics of performance evaluation. When the VF was trained with the mean squared error and the SI model was trained with the combined loss, SDR, PESQ, and STOI were improved by 0.5, 0.06, and 0.002 respectively compared to the system trained only with the mean squared error.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1987.07b
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• pp.1619-1621
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• 1987

In this experiment, we have the result that the speech interval can be extracted with a energy parameter by noise suppression through nonlinear product average in edge enhancement method.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.89-97
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to noise power estimation for speech enhancement in noisy environments. The method based on IMCRA (improved minima controlled recursive averaging) which is widely used in speech enhancement utilizes a rough VAD (voice activity detection) algorithm which excludes speech components during speech periods in order to improves the performance of the noise power estimation by reducing the speech distortion caused by the conventional algorithm based on the minimum power spectrum derived from the noisy speech. However, since the VAD algorithm is not sufficient to distinguish speech from noise at non-stationary noise and low SNRs (signal-to-noise ratios), the speech distortion resulted from the minimum tracking during speech periods still remained. In the proposed method, minimum power estimate obtained by IMCRA is modified by SMT (spectral minima tracking) to reduce the speech distortion derived from the bias of the estimated minimum power. In addition, in order to effectively estimate minimum power by considering the distribution characteristic of the speech and noise spectrum, the presented method combines the minimum estimates provided by IMCRA and SMT depending on the weighting factor based on the subband. Performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by subjective and objective quality tests under various environments and better results compared with the conventional method are obtained.