1,646 research outputs found

    Face Active Appearance Modeling and Speech Acoustic Information to Recover Articulation

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    Articulatory features for robust visual speech recognition

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    Inversion from Audiovisual Speech to Articulatory Information by Exploiting Multimodal Data

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    International audienceWe present an inversion framework to identify speech production properties from audiovisual information. Our system is built on a multimodal articulatory dataset comprising ultrasound, X-ray, magnetic resonance images as well as audio and stereovisual recordings of the speaker. Visual information is captured via stereovision while the vocal tract state is represented by a properly trained articulatory model. Inversion is based on an adaptive piecewise linear approximation of the audiovisualto- articulation mapping. The presented system can recover the hidden vocal tract shapes and may serve as a basis for a more widely applicable inversion setup

    Multimodal Approach to Emotion Recognition for Enhancing Human Machine Interaction - A Survey

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    Emotions are defined as a mental state that occurs instinctively rather than through voluntary effort. They are strong feelings triggered by experiencing the joy, hate, fear, love and is followed by some physiological changes. Emotions play a vital role in social interactions and facilitate the decision making and perception in human being. Emotions are conveyed through speech, facial expression or by physiological signals. There are 6 emotions which are treated as universal emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise and fear. This paper projects different emotion recognition systems which aim at enhancing the Human-Machine interaction. The techniques and systems used in emotion detection may vary depending on the features inspected. This paper explores them in a descriptive and comparative manner. Further the various applications that adopt these systems to reduce the difficulties in implementing the models in real-time are contemplated. Also, A multimodal system with both speech and facial features is proposed for emotion recognition through which it is possible to obtain an enhanced accuracy compare with the existing systems

    Silent Speech Interfaces for Speech Restoration: A Review

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    This work was supported in part by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) under Grant PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The work of Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship (IJCI-2017-32926).This review summarises the status of silent speech interface (SSI) research. SSIs rely on non-acoustic biosignals generated by the human body during speech production to enable communication whenever normal verbal communication is not possible or not desirable. In this review, we focus on the first case and present latest SSI research aimed at providing new alternative and augmentative communication methods for persons with severe speech disorders. SSIs can employ a variety of biosignals to enable silent communication, such as electrophysiological recordings of neural activity, electromyographic (EMG) recordings of vocal tract movements or the direct tracking of articulator movements using imaging techniques. Depending on the disorder, some sensing techniques may be better suited than others to capture speech-related information. For instance, EMG and imaging techniques are well suited for laryngectomised patients, whose vocal tract remains almost intact but are unable to speak after the removal of the vocal folds, but fail for severely paralysed individuals. From the biosignals, SSIs decode the intended message, using automatic speech recognition or speech synthesis algorithms. Despite considerable advances in recent years, most present-day SSIs have only been validated in laboratory settings for healthy users. Thus, as discussed in this paper, a number of challenges remain to be addressed in future research before SSIs can be promoted to real-world applications. If these issues can be addressed successfully, future SSIs will improve the lives of persons with severe speech impairments by restoring their communication capabilities.Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) PID2019-108040RB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporation Fellowship IJCI-2017-3292

    Articulatory features for robust visual speech recognition

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    Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-105).This thesis explores a novel approach to visual speech modeling. Visual speech, or a sequence of images of the speaker's face, is traditionally viewed as a single stream of contiguous units, each corresponding to a phonetic segment. These units are defined heuristically by mapping several visually similar phonemes to one visual phoneme, sometimes referred to as a viseme. However, experimental evidence shows that phonetic models trained from visual data are not synchronous in time with acoustic phonetic models, indicating that visemes may not be the most natural building blocks of visual speech. Instead, we propose to model the visual signal in terms of the underlying articulatory features. This approach is a natural extension of feature-based modeling of acoustic speech, which has been shown to increase robustness of audio-based speech recognition systems. We start by exploring ways of defining visual articulatory features: first in a data-driven manner, using a large, multi-speaker visual speech corpus, and then in a knowledge-driven manner, using the rules of speech production. Based on these studies, we propose a set of articulatory features, and describe a computational framework for feature-based visual speech recognition. Multiple feature streams are detected in the input image sequence using Support Vector Machines, and then incorporated in a Dynamic Bayesian Network to obtain the final word hypothesis. Preliminary experiments show that our approach increases viseme classification rates in visually noisy conditions, and improves visual word recognition through feature-based context modeling.by Ekaterina Saenko.S.M

    ARTICULATORY INFORMATION FOR ROBUST SPEECH RECOGNITION

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    Current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems fail to perform nearly as good as human speech recognition performance due to their lack of robustness against speech variability and noise contamination. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate these critical robustness issues, put forth different ways to address them and finally present an ASR architecture based upon these robustness criteria. Acoustic variations adversely affect the performance of current phone-based ASR systems, in which speech is modeled as `beads-on-a-string', where the beads are the individual phone units. While phone units are distinctive in cognitive domain, they are varying in the physical domain and their variation occurs due to a combination of factors including speech style, speaking rate etc.; a phenomenon commonly known as `coarticulation'. Traditional ASR systems address such coarticulatory variations by using contextualized phone-units such as triphones. Articulatory phonology accounts for coarticulatory variations by modeling speech as a constellation of constricting actions known as articulatory gestures. In such a framework, speech variations such as coarticulation and lenition are accounted for by gestural overlap in time and gestural reduction in space. To realize a gesture-based ASR system, articulatory gestures have to be inferred from the acoustic signal. At the initial stage of this research an initial study was performed using synthetically generated speech to obtain a proof-of-concept that articulatory gestures can indeed be recognized from the speech signal. It was observed that having vocal tract constriction trajectories (TVs) as intermediate representation facilitated the gesture recognition task from the speech signal. Presently no natural speech database contains articulatory gesture annotation; hence an automated iterative time-warping architecture is proposed that can annotate any natural speech database with articulatory gestures and TVs. Two natural speech databases: X-ray microbeam and Aurora-2 were annotated, where the former was used to train a TV-estimator and the latter was used to train a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) based ASR architecture. The DBN architecture used two sets of observation: (a) acoustic features in the form of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and (b) TVs (estimated from the acoustic speech signal). In this setup the articulatory gestures were modeled as hidden random variables, hence eliminating the necessity for explicit gesture recognition. Word recognition results using the DBN architecture indicate that articulatory representations not only can help to account for coarticulatory variations but can also significantly improve the noise robustness of ASR system
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