36,677 research outputs found
The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System
We describe the 2017 version of Microsoft's conversational speech recognition
system, in which we update our 2016 system with recent developments in
neural-network-based acoustic and language modeling to further advance the
state of the art on the Switchboard speech recognition task. The system adds a
CNN-BLSTM acoustic model to the set of model architectures we combined
previously, and includes character-based and dialog session aware LSTM language
models in rescoring. For system combination we adopt a two-stage approach,
whereby subsets of acoustic models are first combined at the senone/frame
level, followed by a word-level voting via confusion networks. We also added a
confusion network rescoring step after system combination. The resulting system
yields a 5.1\% word error rate on the 2000 Switchboard evaluation set
Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies
Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR
Visual units and confusion modelling for automatic lip-reading
Automatic lip-reading (ALR) is a challenging task because the visual speech signal is known to be missing some important information, such as voicing. We propose an approach to ALR that acknowledges that this information is missing but assumes that it is substituted or deleted in a systematic way that can be modelled. We describe a system that learns such a model and then incorporates it into decoding, which is realised as a cascade of weighted finite-state transducers. Our results show a small but statistically significant improvement in recognition accuracy. We also investigate the issue of suitable visual units for ALR, and show that visemes are sub-optimal, not but because they introduce lexical ambiguity, but because the reduction in modelling units entailed by their use reduces accuracy
Enhancing Energy Minimization Framework for Scene Text Recognition with Top-Down Cues
Recognizing scene text is a challenging problem, even more so than the
recognition of scanned documents. This problem has gained significant attention
from the computer vision community in recent years, and several methods based
on energy minimization frameworks and deep learning approaches have been
proposed. In this work, we focus on the energy minimization framework and
propose a model that exploits both bottom-up and top-down cues for recognizing
cropped words extracted from street images. The bottom-up cues are derived from
individual character detections from an image. We build a conditional random
field model on these detections to jointly model the strength of the detections
and the interactions between them. These interactions are top-down cues
obtained from a lexicon-based prior, i.e., language statistics. The optimal
word represented by the text image is obtained by minimizing the energy
function corresponding to the random field model. We evaluate our proposed
algorithm extensively on a number of cropped scene text benchmark datasets,
namely Street View Text, ICDAR 2003, 2011 and 2013 datasets, and IIIT 5K-word,
and show better performance than comparable methods. We perform a rigorous
analysis of all the steps in our approach and analyze the results. We also show
that state-of-the-art convolutional neural network features can be integrated
in our framework to further improve the recognition performance
Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding
Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching
for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with
such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse
examples of our daily dynamic scenes. While most of such scenes are not
particularly exciting, they typically do not appear on YouTube, in movies or TV
broadcasts. So how do we collect sufficiently many diverse but boring samples
representing our lives? We propose a novel Hollywood in Homes approach to
collect such data. Instead of shooting videos in the lab, we ensure diversity
by distributing and crowdsourcing the whole process of video creation from
script writing to video recording and annotation. Following this procedure we
collect a new dataset, Charades, with hundreds of people recording videos in
their own homes, acting out casual everyday activities. The dataset is composed
of 9,848 annotated videos with an average length of 30 seconds, showing
activities of 267 people from three continents. Each video is annotated by
multiple free-text descriptions, action labels, action intervals and classes of
interacted objects. In total, Charades provides 27,847 video descriptions,
66,500 temporally localized intervals for 157 action classes and 41,104 labels
for 46 object classes. Using this rich data, we evaluate and provide baseline
results for several tasks including action recognition and automatic
description generation. We believe that the realism, diversity, and casual
nature of this dataset will present unique challenges and new opportunities for
computer vision community
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