• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.544-551
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• 2023

Speech enhancement used to improve the perceptual quality and intelligibility of noise speech has been studied as a method using a complex-valued spectrum that can improve both magnitude and phase in a method using a magnitude spectrum. In this paper, a study was conducted on how to apply attention mechanism to complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement systems to further improve the intelligibility and quality of noise speech. The attention is performed based on additive attention and allows the attention weight to be calculated in consideration of the complex-valued spectrum. In addition, the global average pooling was used to consider the importance of the feature map. Complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement was performed based on the Deep Complex U-Net (DCUNET) model, and additive attention was conducted based on the proposed method in the Attention U-Net model. The results of the experiments on noise speech in a living room environment showed that the proposed method is improved performance over the baseline model according to evaluation metrics such as Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short Time Object Intelligence (STOI), and consistently improved performance across various background noise environments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Through this, the proposed speech enhancement system demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the intelligibility and quality of noisy speech.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.6 no.6
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• pp.818-827
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a new noise estimation and reduction algorithm for stationary and nonstationary noisy environments. This approach uses an algorithm that classifies the speech and noise signal contributions in time-frequency bins. It relies on the ratio of the normalized standard deviation of the noisy power spectrum in time-frequency bins to its average. If the ratio is greater than an adaptive estimator, speech is considered to be present. The propose method uses an auto control parameter for an adaptive estimator to work well in highly nonstationary noisy environments. The auto control parameter is controlled by a linear function using a posteriori signal to noise ratio(SNR) according to the increase or the decrease of the noise level. The estimated clean speech power spectrum is obtained by a modified gain function and the updated noisy power spectrum of the time-frequency bin. This new algorithm has the advantages of much more simplicity and light computational load for estimating the stationary and nonstationary noise environments. The proposed algorithm is superior to conventional methods. To evaluate the algorithm's performance, we test it using the NOIZEUS database, and use the segment signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) and ITU-T P.835 as evaluation criteria.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.28-33
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• 2000

For efficient quantization of speech representation, it is common to incorporate Perceptual characteristics of human hearing. However, the focus has been confined only to the magnitude information of speech, and little attention has been paid to phase information. This paper presents a novel approach, termed perceptually irrelevant phase elimination (PIPE), to find out irrelevant phase information of acoustic signals in terms of perception. The proposed method, which is based on the observation that the relative phase relationship within a critical band is perceptually important, is derived not only for stationary Fourier signal but also for harmonic signal. The proposed method is incorporated into the analysis/synthesis system based on harmonic representation of speech, and subjective test results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.52-57
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• 2000

In this paper, we designed the 16 Kbps speech coder that has compatibility with CS-ACELP algorithm(G.729). The speech signal is sampled at rate of 16 KHz, divided into two narrowband signal by QMF filterbank, and decimated to rate of 8 KHz. The lower-band signal is encoded by CS-ACELP and the upper-band signal is encoded by Adaptive Transform Coding(ATC) algorithm. At the receiver, two band signals are synthesized by decoder of CS-ACELP and ATC, respectively. The reconstructed output is obtained by passing the QMF synthesis bank. The proposed wideband coder is evaluated with ITU-T G.722 coder through the Mean Opinion Score(MOS) test.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.122-126
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• 2002

In this study, we find features of 3 emotions (Happiness, Angry, Surprise) as the fundamental research of emotion recognition. Speech signal with emotion has several elements. That is, voice quality, pitch, formant, speech speed, etc. Until now, most researchers have used the change of pitch or Short-time average power envelope or Mel based speech power coefficients. Of course, pitch is very efficient and informative feature. Thus we used it in this study. As pitch is very sensitive to a delicate emotion, it changes easily whenever a man is at different emotional state. Therefore, we can find the pitch is changed steeply or changed with gentle slope or not changed. And, this paper extracts formant features from speech signal with emotion. Each vowels show that each formant has similar position without big difference. Based on this fact, in the pleasure case, we extract features of laughter. And, with that, we separate laughing for easy work. Also, we find those far the angry and surprise.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.5-12
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• 1996

We propose a two-channel(Speech & EGG) pitch detection algorithm. The EGG signal monitors the vibratory motion of vocal folds very well. Therefore, using the EGG signal as well as speech signal, we obtain a reliable and robust pitch detection algorithm that minimizers problems occuring in the pitch detection with speech only. The proposed algorithm gives precise pitch markers that are synchronized to the speech in the time domain. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the two-channel pitch detection algorithm over the conventional method, and it can be used in obtaining reference pitch for evaluation of other pitch detection algorithms.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.117-123
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• 2011

Most individuals with hearing impairment have difficulty in understanding speech in noisy situations. This study was conducted to investigate sentence recognition ability using the Korean Standard-Sentence Lists for Preschoolers (KS-SL-P2) in pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. The subjects of this study were 10 pre-school age children with hearing aids, 12 pre-school age children with cochlear implants, and 10 pre-school age children with normal hearing. Three kinds of signal-to-noise (SNR) conditions (+10 dB, +5 dB, 0 dB) were applied. The results for all pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids presented a significant increase in the score for sentence recognition as SNR increased. The sentence recognition score in speech noise were obtained with the SNR +10 dB. Significant differences existed between groups in terms of their sentence recognition ability, with the cochlear implant group performing better than the hearing aid group. These findings suggest the presence of a sentence recognition test using speech noise is useful for evaluating pre-school age children's listening skill.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.515-519
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• 2005

Pitch period that is a important factor in speech signal processing is used in various applications such as speech recognition, speaker identification, speech analysis and synthesis. So many pitch detection algoritms have been studied until now. AMDF which is one of pitch period detection algorithms chooses the time interval from valley point to valley point as pitch period. In selection of valley point to detect pitch period, complexity of the algoritm is increased. So in this paper we proposed the simple algorithm using modified AMDF that detects global minimum valley point as pitch period of speech signal and compared existing methods with it through simulation.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1996.07b
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• pp.1295-1297
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• 1996

CCITT G.721, G.723 standard ADPCM algorithm is implemented by using TI's fixed point DSP start kit (DSK). ADPCM can be implemented on a various rates, such as 16K, 24K, 32K and 40K. The ADPCM is sample based compression technique and its complexity is not so high as the other speech compression techniques such as CELP, VSELP and GSM, etc. ADPCM is widely applicable to most of the low cost speech compression application and they are tapeless answering machine, simultaneous voice and fax modem, digital phone, etc. TMS320C50 DSP is a low cost fixed point DSP chip and C50 DSK system has an AIC (analog interface chip) which operates as a single chip A/D and D/A converter with 14 bit resolution, C50 DSP chip with on-chip memory of 10K and RS232C interface module. ADPCM C code is compiled by TI C50 C-compiler and implemented on the DSK on-chip memory. Speech signal input is converted into 14 bit linear PCM data and encoded into ADPCM data and the data is sent to PC through RS232C. The ADPCM data on PC is received by the DSK through RS232C and then decoded to generate the 14 bit linear PCM data and converted into the speech signal. The DSK system has audio in/out jack and we can input and out the speech signal.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.3E
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• pp.18-24
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• 2001

Speaking rate represents how many phonemes in speech signal have in limited time. It is various and changeable depending on the speakers and the characters of each phoneme. The preprocessing to remove the effect of variety of speaking rate is necessary before recognizing the speech in the present speech recognition systems. So if it is possible to estimate the speaking rate in advance, the performance of speech recognition can be higher. However, the conventional speech vocoder decides the transmission rate for analyzing the fixed period no regardless of the variety rate of phoneme but if the speaking rate can be estimated in advance, it is very important information of speech to use in speech coding part as well. It increases the quality of sound in vocoder as well as applies the variable transmission rate. In this paper, we propose the method for presenting the speaking rate as parameter in speech vocoder. To estimate the speaking rate, the variety of phoneme is estimated and the Line Spectrum Pairs is used to estimate it. As a result of comparing the speaking rate performance with the proposed algorithm and passivity method worked by eye, error between two methods is 5.38% about fast utterance and 1.78% about slow utterance and the accuracy between two methods is 98% about slow utterance and 94% about fast utterances in 30 dB SNR and 10 dB SNR respectively.