Estimating Speaking Rate by Means of Rhythmicity Parameters

In this paper we present a speech rate estimator based on so-called rhythmicity features derived from a modified version of the short-time energy envelope. To evaluate the new method, it is compared to a traditional speech rate estimator on the basis of semi-automatic segmentation. Speech material from the Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) covering intoxicated and sober speech of different speech styles provides a statistically sound foundation to test upon. The proposed measure clearly correlates with the semi-automatically determined speech rate and seems to be robust across speech styles and speaker states

Automatic speech recognition with deep neural networks for impaired speech

The final publication is available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-49169-1_10Automatic Speech Recognition has reached almost human performance in some controlled scenarios. However, recognition of impaired speech is a difficult task for two main reasons: data is (i) scarce and (ii) heterogeneous. In this work we train different architectures on a database of dysarthric speech. A comparison between architectures shows that, even with a small database, hybrid DNN-HMM models outperform classical GMM-HMM according to word error rate measures. A DNN is able to improve the recognition word error rate a 13% for subjects with dysarthria with respect to the best classical architecture. This improvement is higher than the one given by other deep neural networks such as CNNs, TDNNs and LSTMs. All the experiments have been done with the Kaldi toolkit for speech recognition for which we have adapted several recipes to deal with dysarthric speech and work on the TORGO database. These recipes are publicly available.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

GLRT-Based Direction Detectors in Homogeneous Noise and Subspace Interference

In this paper, we derive and assess decision schemes to discriminate, resorting to an array of sensors, between the H0 hypothesis that data under test contain disturbance only (i.e., noise plus interference) and the H1 hypothesis that they also contain signal components along a direction which is a priori unknown but constrained to belong to a given subspace of the observables. The disturbance is modeled in terms of complex normal random vectors plus deterministic interference assumed to belong to a known subspace. We assume that a set of noise-only (secondary) data is available, which possess the same statistical characterization of noise in the cells under test. At the design stage, we resort to either the plain generalized-likelihood ratio test (GLRT) or the two-step GLRT-based design procedure. The performance analysis, conducted resorting to simulated data, shows that the one-step GLRT performs better than the detector relying on the two-step design procedure when the number of secondary data is comparable to the number of sensors; moreover, it outperforms a one-step GLRT-based subspace detector when the dimension of the signal subspace is sufficiently high

Bibliographic Review on Distributed Kalman Filtering

In recent years, a compelling need has arisen to understand the effects of distributed information structures on estimation and filtering. In this paper, a bibliographical review on distributed Kalman filtering (DKF) is provided.\ud The paper contains a classification of different approaches and methods involved to DKF. The applications of DKF are also discussed and explained separately. A comparison of different approaches is briefly carried out. Focuses on the contemporary research are also addressed with emphasis on the practical applications of the techniques. An exhaustive list of publications, linked directly or indirectly to DKF in the open literature, is compiled to provide an overall picture of different developing aspects of this area