143 research outputs found
Convolutional Neural Networks for Raw Speech Recognition
State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems map the speech signal into its corresponding text. Traditional ASR systems are based on Gaussian mixture model. The emergence of deep learning drastically improved the recognition rate of ASR systems. Such systems are replacing traditional ASR systems. These systems can also be trained in end-to-end manner. End-to-end ASR systems are gaining much popularity due to simplified model-building process and abilities to directly map speech into the text without any predefined alignments. Three major types of end-to-end architectures for ASR are attention-based methods, connectionist temporal classification, and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based direct raw speech model. In this chapter, CNN-based acoustic model for raw speech signal is discussed. It establishes the relation between raw speech signal and phones in a data-driven manner. Relevant features and classifier both are jointly learned from the raw speech. Raw speech is processed by first convolutional layer to learn the feature representation. The output of first convolutional layer, that is, intermediate representation, is more discriminative and further processed by rest convolutional layers. This system uses only few parameters and performs better than traditional cepstral feature-based systems. The performance of the system is evaluated for TIMIT and claimed similar performance as MFCC
Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View Imagery using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Recognizing arbitrary multi-character text in unconstrained natural
photographs is a hard problem. In this paper, we address an equally hard
sub-problem in this domain viz. recognizing arbitrary multi-digit numbers from
Street View imagery. Traditional approaches to solve this problem typically
separate out the localization, segmentation, and recognition steps. In this
paper we propose a unified approach that integrates these three steps via the
use of a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the image
pixels. We employ the DistBelief implementation of deep neural networks in
order to train large, distributed neural networks on high quality images. We
find that the performance of this approach increases with the depth of the
convolutional network, with the best performance occurring in the deepest
architecture we trained, with eleven hidden layers. We evaluate this approach
on the publicly available SVHN dataset and achieve over accuracy in
recognizing complete street numbers. We show that on a per-digit recognition
task, we improve upon the state-of-the-art, achieving accuracy. We
also evaluate this approach on an even more challenging dataset generated from
Street View imagery containing several tens of millions of street number
annotations and achieve over accuracy. To further explore the
applicability of the proposed system to broader text recognition tasks, we
apply it to synthetic distorted text from reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is one of the
most secure reverse turing tests that uses distorted text to distinguish humans
from bots. We report a accuracy on the hardest category of reCAPTCHA.
Our evaluations on both tasks indicate that at specific operating thresholds,
the performance of the proposed system is comparable to, and in some cases
exceeds, that of human operators
Reading Scene Text in Deep Convolutional Sequences
We develop a Deep-Text Recurrent Network (DTRN) that regards scene text
reading as a sequence labelling problem. We leverage recent advances of deep
convolutional neural networks to generate an ordered high-level sequence from a
whole word image, avoiding the difficult character segmentation problem. Then a
deep recurrent model, building on long short-term memory (LSTM), is developed
to robustly recognize the generated CNN sequences, departing from most existing
approaches recognising each character independently. Our model has a number of
appealing properties in comparison to existing scene text recognition methods:
(i) It can recognise highly ambiguous words by leveraging meaningful context
information, allowing it to work reliably without either pre- or
post-processing; (ii) the deep CNN feature is robust to various image
distortions; (iii) it retains the explicit order information in word image,
which is essential to discriminate word strings; (iv) the model does not depend
on pre-defined dictionary, and it can process unknown words and arbitrary
strings. Codes for the DTRN will be available.Comment: To appear in the 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI-16), 201
Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions
The focus of this paper is speeding up the evaluation of convolutional neural
networks. While delivering impressive results across a range of computer vision
and machine learning tasks, these networks are computationally demanding,
limiting their deployability. Convolutional layers generally consume the bulk
of the processing time, and so in this work we present two simple schemes for
drastically speeding up these layers. This is achieved by exploiting
cross-channel or filter redundancy to construct a low rank basis of filters
that are rank-1 in the spatial domain. Our methods are architecture agnostic,
and can be easily applied to existing CPU and GPU convolutional frameworks for
tuneable speedup performance. We demonstrate this with a real world network
designed for scene text character recognition, showing a possible 2.5x speedup
with no loss in accuracy, and 4.5x speedup with less than 1% drop in accuracy,
still achieving state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks
Bio-motivated features and deep learning for robust speech recognition
Mención Internacional en el título de doctorIn spite of the enormous leap forward that the Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR) technologies has experienced over the last five years
their performance under hard environmental condition is still far from
that of humans preventing their adoption in several real applications.
In this thesis the challenge of robustness of modern automatic speech
recognition systems is addressed following two main research lines.
The first one focuses on modeling the human auditory system to
improve the robustness of the feature extraction stage yielding to novel
auditory motivated features. Two main contributions are produced.
On the one hand, a model of the masking behaviour of the Human
Auditory System (HAS) is introduced, based on the non-linear filtering
of a speech spectro-temporal representation applied simultaneously
to both frequency and time domains. This filtering is accomplished
by using image processing techniques, in particular mathematical
morphology operations with an specifically designed Structuring Element
(SE) that closely resembles the masking phenomena that take
place in the cochlea. On the other hand, the temporal patterns of
auditory-nerve firings are modeled. Most conventional acoustic features
are based on short-time energy per frequency band discarding
the information contained in the temporal patterns. Our contribution
is the design of several types of feature extraction schemes based on
the synchrony effect of auditory-nerve activity, showing that the modeling
of this effect can indeed improve speech recognition accuracy in
the presence of additive noise. Both models are further integrated into
the well known Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC).
The second research line addresses the problem of robustness in
noisy environments by means of the use of Deep Neural Networks
(DNNs)-based acoustic modeling and, in particular, of Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures. A deep residual network
scheme is proposed and adapted for our purposes, allowing Residual
Networks (ResNets), originally intended for image processing tasks,
to be used in speech recognition where the network input is small
in comparison with usual image dimensions. We have observed that
ResNets on their own already enhance the robustness of the whole system
against noisy conditions. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate
that their combination with the auditory motivated features devised
in this thesis provide significant improvements in recognition accuracy
in comparison to other state-of-the-art CNN-based ASR systems
under mismatched conditions, while maintaining the performance in
matched scenarios.
The proposed methods have been thoroughly tested and compared
with other state-of-the-art proposals for a variety of datasets and
conditions. The obtained results prove that our methods outperform
other state-of-the-art approaches and reveal that they are suitable for
practical applications, specially where the operating conditions are
unknown.El objetivo de esta tesis se centra en proponer soluciones al problema
del reconocimiento de habla robusto; por ello, se han llevado a cabo
dos líneas de investigación.
En la primera líınea se han propuesto esquemas de extracción de características novedosos, basados en el modelado del comportamiento
del sistema auditivo humano, modelando especialmente los fenómenos
de enmascaramiento y sincronía. En la segunda, se propone mejorar
las tasas de reconocimiento mediante el uso de técnicas de
aprendizaje profundo, en conjunto con las características propuestas.
Los métodos propuestos tienen como principal objetivo, mejorar la
precisión del sistema de reconocimiento cuando las condiciones de
operación no son conocidas, aunque el caso contrario también ha sido
abordado.
En concreto, nuestras principales propuestas son los siguientes:
Simular el sistema auditivo humano con el objetivo de mejorar
la tasa de reconocimiento en condiciones difíciles, principalmente
en situaciones de alto ruido, proponiendo esquemas de
extracción de características novedosos.
Siguiendo esta dirección, nuestras principales propuestas se detallan a continuación:
• Modelar el comportamiento de enmascaramiento del sistema
auditivo humano, usando técnicas del procesado de
imagen sobre el espectro, en concreto, llevando a cabo el
diseño de un filtro morfológico que captura este efecto.
• Modelar el efecto de la sincroní que tiene lugar en el nervio
auditivo.
• La integración de ambos modelos en los conocidos Power
Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC).
La aplicación de técnicas de aprendizaje profundo con el objetivo
de hacer el sistema más robusto frente al ruido, en particular
con el uso de redes neuronales convolucionales profundas, como
pueden ser las redes residuales.
Por último, la aplicación de las características propuestas en
combinación con las redes neuronales profundas, con el objetivo
principal de obtener mejoras significativas, cuando las condiciones
de entrenamiento y test no coinciden.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Javier Ferreiros López.- Secretario: Fernando Díaz de María.- Vocal: Rubén Solera Ureñ
Improved training of end-to-end attention models for speech recognition
Sequence-to-sequence attention-based models on subword units allow simple
open-vocabulary end-to-end speech recognition. In this work, we show that such
models can achieve competitive results on the Switchboard 300h and LibriSpeech
1000h tasks. In particular, we report the state-of-the-art word error rates
(WER) of 3.54% on the dev-clean and 3.82% on the test-clean evaluation subsets
of LibriSpeech. We introduce a new pretraining scheme by starting with a high
time reduction factor and lowering it during training, which is crucial both
for convergence and final performance. In some experiments, we also use an
auxiliary CTC loss function to help the convergence. In addition, we train long
short-term memory (LSTM) language models on subword units. By shallow fusion,
we report up to 27% relative improvements in WER over the attention baseline
without a language model.Comment: submitted to Interspeech 201
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