Text-independent bilingual speaker verification system.

Ma Bin.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-102).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.ivChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Biometrics --- p.2Chapter 1.2 --- Speaker Verification --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- Overview of Speaker Verification Systems --- p.4Chapter 1.4 --- Text Dependency --- p.4Chapter 1.4.1 --- Text-Dependent Speaker Verification --- p.5Chapter 1.4.2 --- GMM-based Speaker Verification --- p.6Chapter 1.5 --- Language Dependency --- p.6Chapter 1.6 --- Normalization Techniques --- p.7Chapter 1.7 --- Objectives of the Thesis --- p.8Chapter 1.8 --- Thesis Organization --- p.8Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.10Chapter 2.1 --- Background Information --- p.11Chapter 2.1.1 --- Speech Signal Acquisition --- p.11Chapter 2.1.2 --- Speech Processing --- p.11Chapter 2.1.3 --- Engineering Model of Speech Signal --- p.13Chapter 2.1.4 --- Speaker Information in the Speech Signal --- p.14Chapter 2.1.5 --- Feature Parameters --- p.15Chapter 2.1.5.1 --- Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients --- p.16Chapter 2.1.5.2 --- Linear Predictive Coding Derived Cep- stral Coefficients --- p.18Chapter 2.1.5.3 --- Energy Measures --- p.20Chapter 2.1.5.4 --- Derivatives of Cepstral Coefficients --- p.21Chapter 2.1.6 --- Evaluating Speaker Verification Systems --- p.22Chapter 2.2 --- Common Techniques --- p.24Chapter 2.2.1 --- Template Model Matching Methods --- p.25Chapter 2.2.2 --- Statistical Model Methods --- p.26Chapter 2.2.2.1 --- HMM Modeling Technique --- p.27Chapter 2.2.2.2 --- GMM Modeling Techniques --- p.30Chapter 2.2.2.3 --- Gaussian Mixture Model --- p.31Chapter 2.2.2.4 --- The Advantages of GMM --- p.32Chapter 2.2.3 --- Likelihood Scoring --- p.32Chapter 2.2.4 --- General Approach to Decision Making --- p.35Chapter 2.2.5 --- Cohort Normalization --- p.35Chapter 2.2.5.1 --- Probability Score Normalization --- p.36Chapter 2.2.5.2 --- Cohort Selection --- p.37Chapter 2.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.38Chapter 3 --- Experimental Corpora --- p.39Chapter 3.1 --- The YOHO Corpus --- p.39Chapter 3.1.1 --- Design of the YOHO Corpus --- p.39Chapter 3.1.2 --- Data Collection Process of the YOHO Corpus --- p.40Chapter 3.1.3 --- Experimentation with the YOHO Corpus --- p.41Chapter 3.2 --- CUHK Bilingual Speaker Verification Corpus --- p.42Chapter 3.2.1 --- Design of the CUBS Corpus --- p.42Chapter 3.2.2 --- Data Collection Process for the CUBS Corpus --- p.44Chapter 3.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.46Chapter 4 --- Text-Dependent Speaker Verification --- p.47Chapter 4.1 --- Front-End Processing on the YOHO Corpus --- p.48Chapter 4.2 --- Cohort Normalization Setup --- p.50Chapter 4.3 --- HMM-based Speaker Verification Experiments --- p.53Chapter 4.3.1 --- Subword HMM Models --- p.53Chapter 4.3.2 --- Experimental Results --- p.55Chapter 4.3.2.1 --- Comparison of Feature Representations --- p.55Chapter 4.3.2.2 --- Effect of Cohort Normalization --- p.58Chapter 4.4 --- Experiments on GMM-based Speaker Verification --- p.61Chapter 4.4.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.61Chapter 4.4.2 --- The number of Gaussian Mixture Components --- p.62Chapter 4.4.3 --- The Effect of Cohort Normalization --- p.64Chapter 4.4.4 --- Comparison of HMM and GMM --- p.65Chapter 4.5 --- Comparison with Previous Systems --- p.67Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.70Chapter 5 --- Language- and Text-Independent Speaker Verification --- p.71Chapter 5.1 --- Front-End Processing of the CUBS --- p.72Chapter 5.2 --- Language- and Text-Independent Speaker Modeling --- p.73Chapter 5.3 --- Cohort Normalization --- p.74Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results and Analysis --- p.75Chapter 5.4.1 --- Number of Gaussian Mixture Components --- p.78Chapter 5.4.2 --- The Cohort Normalization Effect --- p.79Chapter 5.4.3 --- Language Dependency --- p.80Chapter 5.4.4 --- Language-Independency --- p.83Chapter 5.5 --- Chapter Summary --- p.88Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.90Chapter 6.1 --- Summary --- p.90Chapter 6.1.1 --- Feature Comparison --- p.91Chapter 6.1.2 --- HMM Modeling --- p.91Chapter 6.1.3 --- GMM Modeling --- p.91Chapter 6.1.4 --- Cohort Normalization --- p.92Chapter 6.1.5 --- Language Dependency --- p.92Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.93Chapter 6.2.1 --- Feature Parameters --- p.93Chapter 6.2.2 --- Model Quality --- p.93Chapter 6.2.2.1 --- Variance Flooring --- p.93Chapter 6.2.2.2 --- Silence Detection --- p.94Chapter 6.2.3 --- Conversational Speaker Verification --- p.95Bibliography --- p.10

Phoneme duration modelling for speaker verification

Higher-level features are considered to be a potential remedy against transmission line and cross-channel degradations, currently some of the biggest problems associated with speaker verification. Phoneme durations in particular are not altered by these factors; thus a robust duration model will be a particularly useful addition to traditional cepstral based speaker verification systems. In this dissertation we investigate the feasibility of phoneme durations as a feature for speaker verification. Simple speaker specific triphone duration models are created to statistically represent the phoneme durations. Durations are obtained from an automatic hidden Markov model (HMM) based automatic speech recognition system and are modeled using single mixture Gaussian distributions. These models are applied in a speaker verification system (trained and tested on the YOHO corpus) and found to be a useful feature, even when used in isolation. When fused with acoustic features, verification performance increases significantly. A novel speech rate normalization technique is developed in order to remove some of the inherent intra-speaker variability (due to differing speech rates). Speech rate variability has a negative impact on both speaker verification and automatic speech recognition. Although the duration modelling seems to benefit only slightly from this procedure, the fused system performance improvement is substantial. Other factors known to influence the duration of phonemes are incorporated into the duration model. Utterance final lengthening is known be a consistent effect and thus “position in sentence” is modeled. “Position in word” is also modeled since triphones do not provide enough contextual information. This is found to improve performance since some vowels’ duration are particularly sensitive to its position in the word. Data scarcity becomes a problem when building speaker specific duration models. By using information from available data, unknown durations can be predicted in an attempt to overcome the data scarcity problem. To this end we develop a novel approach to predict unknown phoneme durations from the values of known phoneme durations for a particular speaker, based on the maximum likelihood criterion. This model is based on the observation that phonemes from the same broad phonetic class tend to co-vary strongly, but that there is also significant cross-class correlations. This approach is tested on the TIMIT corpus and found to be more accurate than using back-off techniques.Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2009.Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineeringunrestricte

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Towards natural speech acquisition: incremental word learning with limited data

Ayllon Clemente I. Towards natural speech acquisition: incremental word learning with limited data. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University; 2013

Noise-Robust Voice Conversion

A persistent challenge in speech processing is the presence of noise that reduces the quality of speech signals. Whether natural speech is used as input or speech is the desirable output to be synthesized, noise degrades the performance of these systems and causes output speech to be unnatural. Speech enhancement deals with such a problem, typically seeking to improve the input speech or post-processes the (re)synthesized speech. An intriguing complement to post-processing speech signals is voice conversion, in which speech by one person (source speaker) is made to sound as if spoken by a different person (target speaker). Traditionally, the majority of speech enhancement and voice conversion methods rely on parametric modeling of speech. A promising complement to parametric models is an inventory-based approach, which is the focus of this work. In inventory-based speech systems, one records an inventory of clean speech signals as a reference. Noisy speech (in the case of enhancement) or target speech (in the case of conversion) can then be replaced by the best-matching clean speech in the inventory, which is found via a correlation search method. Such an approach has the potential to alleviate intelligibility and unnaturalness issues often encountered by parametric modeling speech processing systems. This work investigates and compares inventory-based speech enhancement methods with conventional ones. In addition, the inventory search method is applied to estimate source speaker characteristics for voice conversion in noisy environments. Two noisy-environment voice conversion systems were constructed for a comparative study: a direct voice conversion system and an inventory-based voice conversion system, both with limited noise filtering at the front end. Results from this work suggest that the inventory method offers encouraging improvements over the direct conversion method

Robust text independent closed set speaker identification systems and their evaluation

PhD ThesisThis thesis focuses upon text independent closed set speaker identi cation. The contributions relate to evaluation studies in the presence of various types of noise and handset e ects. Extensive evaluations are performed on four databases. The rst contribution is in the context of the use of the Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) with original speech recordings from only the TIMIT database. Four main simulations for Speaker Identi cation Accuracy (SIA) are presented including di erent fusion strategies: Late fusion (score based), early fusion (feature based) and early-late fusion (combination of feature and score based), late fusion using concatenated static and dynamic features (features with temporal derivatives such as rst order derivative delta and second order derivative delta-delta features, namely acceleration features), and nally fusion of statistically independent normalized scores. The second contribution is again based on the GMM-UBM approach. Comprehensive evaluations of the e ect of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), and Non-Stationary Noise (NSN) (with and without a G.712 type handset) upon identi cation performance are undertaken. In particular, three NSN types with varying Signal to Noise Ratios (SNRs) were tested corresponding to: street tra c, a bus interior and a crowded talking environment. The performance evaluation also considered the e ect of late fusion techniques based on score fusion, namely mean, maximum, and linear weighted sum fusion. The databases employed were: TIMIT, SITW, and NIST 2008; and 120 speakers were selected from each database to yield 3,600 speech utterances. The third contribution is based on the use of the I-vector, four combinations of I-vectors with 100 and 200 dimensions were employed. Then, various fusion techniques using maximum, mean, weighted sum and cumulative fusion with the same I-vector dimension were used to improve the SIA. Similarly, both interleaving and concatenated I-vector fusion were exploited to produce 200 and 400 I-vector dimensions. The system was evaluated with four di erent databases using 120 speakers from each database. TIMIT, SITW and NIST 2008 databases were evaluated for various types of NSN namely, street-tra c NSN, bus-interior NSN and crowd talking NSN; and the G.712 type handset at 16 kHz was also applied. As recommendations from the study in terms of the GMM-UBM approach, mean fusion is found to yield overall best performance in terms of the SIA with noisy speech, whereas linear weighted sum fusion is overall best for original database recordings. However, in the I-vector approach the best SIA was obtained from the weighted sum and the concatenated fusion.Ministry of Higher Education and Scienti c Research (MoHESR), and the Iraqi Cultural Attach e, Al-Mustansiriya University, Al-Mustansiriya University College of Engineering in Iraq for supporting my PhD scholarship

Subspace Gaussian mixture models for automatic speech recognition

In most of state-of-the-art speech recognition systems, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model the density of the emitting states in the hidden Markov models (HMMs). In a conventional system, the model parameters of each GMM are estimated directly and independently given the alignment. This results a large number of model parameters to be estimated, and consequently, a large amount of training data is required to fit the model. In addition, different sources of acoustic variability that impact the accuracy of a recogniser such as pronunciation variation, accent, speaker factor and environmental noise are only weakly modelled and factorized by adaptation techniques such as maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR), maximum a posteriori adaptation (MAP) and vocal tract length normalisation (VTLN). In this thesis, we will discuss an alternative acoustic modelling approach — the subspace Gaussian mixture model (SGMM), which is expected to deal with these two issues better. In an SGMM, the model parameters are derived from low-dimensional model and speaker subspaces that can capture phonetic and speaker correlations. Given these subspaces, only a small number of state-dependent parameters are required to derive the corresponding GMMs. Hence, the total number of model parameters can be reduced, which allows acoustic modelling with a limited amount of training data. In addition, the SGMM-based acoustic model factorizes the phonetic and speaker factors and within this framework, other source of acoustic variability may also be explored. In this thesis, we propose a regularised model estimation for SGMMs, which avoids overtraining in case that the training data is sparse. We will also take advantage of the structure of SGMMs to explore cross-lingual acoustic modelling for low-resource speech recognition. Here, the model subspace is estimated from out-domain data and ported to the target language system. In this case, only the state-dependent parameters need to be estimated which relaxes the requirement of the amount of training data. To improve the robustness of SGMMs against environmental noise, we propose to apply the joint uncertainty decoding (JUD) technique that is shown to be efficient and effective. We will report experimental results on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) database and GlobalPhone corpora to evaluate the regularisation and cross-lingual modelling of SGMMs. Noise compensation using JUD for SGMM acoustic models is evaluated on the Aurora 4 database