• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.256-261
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) which is based on the conditional maximum a posteriori criterion. A crucial component of a practical speech enhancement system is the estimation of the noise power spectrum. One state-of-the-art approach is the minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) technique. The noise estimate in the MCRA technique is obtained by averaging past spectral power values based on a smoothing parameter that is adjusted by the signal presence probability in frequency subbands. We improve the MCRA using the speech presence probability which is the a posteriori probability conditioned on both the current observation the speech presence or absence of the previous frame. With the performance criteria of the ITU-T P.862 perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and subjective evaluation of speech quality, we show that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional MCRA-based scheme.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.42-47
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• 2000

This paper describes a real-time implementation of a GSM-EFR (Global System for Mobil communications Enhanced Full Rate) speech coder using OakDSP core; a 16bit fixed-point Digital Signal Processor (DSP) by DSP Group, Inc. The real-time implemented speech coder required about 24MIPS for computation and 7.06K words and 12.19K words for code and data memory, respectively. The implemented GSM-EFR speech coder passes all of test vectors provided by ETSI (European Telecommunication Standard Institute), and perceptual speech quality measurement using MNB algorithm shows that the quality of the GSM-EFR speech coder is similar to the one of 32kbps ADPCM. The real-time implemented GSM-EFR speech coder which is the highest bit-rate mode of the GSM-AMR speech coder will be used as the basic structure of the GSM-AMR speech coder which is embedded in MODEM ASIC of IMT2000 asynchronous mode mobile station.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.7
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• pp.383-389
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a improved speech absence probability estimation algorithm by applying environmental noise classification for speech enhancement. The previous speech absence probability required to seek a priori probability of speech absence was derived by applying microphone input signal and the noise signal based on the estimated value of a posteriori SNR threshold. In this paper, the proposed algorithm estimates the speech absence probability using noise classification algorithm which is based on Gaussian mixture model in order to apply the optimal parameter each noise types, unlike the conventional fixed threshold and smoothing parameter. Performance of the proposed enhancement algorithm is evaluated by ITU-T P.862 PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) and composite measure under various noise environments. It is verified that the proposed algorithm yields better results compared to the conventional speech absence probability estimation algorithm.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.180-190
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: Although many studies have evaluated the effect of the digital noise reduction (DNR) algorithm of hearing aids (HAs) on speech recognition, there are few studies on the effect of DNR on music perception. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate the effect of DNR on music, in addition to speech perception, using objective and subjective measurements. Subjects and Methods: Sixteen HA users participated in this study (58.00±10.44 years; 3 males and 13 females). The objective assessment of speech and music perception was based on the Korean version of the Clinical Assessment of Music Perception test and word and sentence recognition scores. Meanwhile, for the subjective assessment, the quality rating of speech and music as well as self-reported HA benefits were evaluated. Results: There was no improvement conferred with DNR of HAs on the objective assessment tests of speech and music perception. The pitch discrimination at 262 Hz in the DNR-off condition was better than that in the unaided condition (p=0.024); however, the unaided condition and the DNR-on conditions did not differ. In the Korean music background questionnaire, responses regarding ease of communication were better in the DNR-on condition than in the DNR-off condition (p=0.029). Conclusions: Speech and music perception or sound quality did not improve with the activation of DNR. However, DNR positively influenced the listener's subjective listening comfort. The DNR-off condition in HAs may be beneficial for pitch discrimination at some frequencies.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.180-190
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: Although many studies have evaluated the effect of the digital noise reduction (DNR) algorithm of hearing aids (HAs) on speech recognition, there are few studies on the effect of DNR on music perception. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate the effect of DNR on music, in addition to speech perception, using objective and subjective measurements. Subjects and Methods: Sixteen HA users participated in this study (58.00±10.44 years; 3 males and 13 females). The objective assessment of speech and music perception was based on the Korean version of the Clinical Assessment of Music Perception test and word and sentence recognition scores. Meanwhile, for the subjective assessment, the quality rating of speech and music as well as self-reported HA benefits were evaluated. Results: There was no improvement conferred with DNR of HAs on the objective assessment tests of speech and music perception. The pitch discrimination at 262 Hz in the DNR-off condition was better than that in the unaided condition (p=0.024); however, the unaided condition and the DNR-on conditions did not differ. In the Korean music background questionnaire, responses regarding ease of communication were better in the DNR-on condition than in the DNR-off condition (p=0.029). Conclusions: Speech and music perception or sound quality did not improve with the activation of DNR. However, DNR positively influenced the listener's subjective listening comfort. The DNR-off condition in HAs may be beneficial for pitch discrimination at some frequencies.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.253-259
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• 2024

This paper proposes a new speech enhancement model based on a complex nested U-Net with a dual-branch decoder. The proposed model consists of a complex nested U-Net to simultaneously estimate the magnitude and phase components of the speech signal, and the decoder has a dual-branch decoder structure that performs spectral mapping and time-frequency masking in each branch. At this time, compared to the single-branch decoder structure, the dual-branch decoder structure allows noise to be effectively removed while minimizing the loss of speech information. The experiment was conducted on the VoiceBank + DEMAND database, commonly used for speech enhancement model training, and was evaluated through various objective evaluation metrics. As a result of the experiment, the complex nested U-Net-based speech enhancement model using a dual-branch decoder increased the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score by about 0.13 compared to the baseline, and showed a higher objective evaluation score than recently proposed speech enhancement models.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.169-174
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• 2003

A novel subspace speech enhancement using subband whitening filter is proposed. Previous subspace speech enhancement method either assumes additive white noise or uses whitening filter as a pre-processing for colored noise. The proposed method tries to minimize the signal distortion while reducing residual noise by processing the signal using subband whitening filter. By incorporating the notion of subband whitening filter, spectral resolution in Karhunen-Loeve(KL) domain is improved with the negligible additional computational load. The proposed method outperforms both the subspace method suggested by Ephraim and the spectral subtraction suggested by Boll in terms of segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SNRseg) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.82-90
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient method to enhance the quality of synthesized speech in HMM based speech synthesis system. The proposed method trains spectral parameters and excitation signals using Gaussian mixture model, and estimates appropriate excitation signals from spectral parameters during the synthesis stage. Both WB-PESQ and MUSHRA results show that the proposed method provides better speech quality than conventional HMM based speech synthesis system.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.62-68
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• 2010

This paper proposes a new masking threshold adjustment strategy to improve the performance for speech signals in low bit-rate audio coding. After determining formant regions, the masking threshold is adjusted by using the energy ratio of each sub-band to the average energy of each formant. More quantization noises are added to the bands that have relatively large energy, but less distortion is allowed in spectral valley regions by allocating more bits, which reflects the concept of perceptual weighting widely used in speech coding. From the results of objective speech quality measure, we verified that the proposed method improves quality for the speech input signals compared to the conventional one.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.509-516
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• 1991

In this paper, we propose on objective evaluation model of telephone transmission qulity in order to estimate a satisfaction score regarding speech quality in a relephone network. As the degradantion factors of telephone transmission quality, this model takes into account transmission loss, noise, distortion, talker echo and sidetone. A performance index[PI] is introduced for five psychological factors affecting telephone speech qualty, and a Mean Opinion Score(MOS) is estimated from the sum of all Pis. The simulation results indicate theat the MOS obtained from the objective evaluation model is in good agreement with that of subjective evaluation.