6,804 research outputs found
DolphinAtack: Inaudible Voice Commands
Speech recognition (SR) systems such as Siri or Google Now have become an
increasingly popular human-computer interaction method, and have turned various
systems into voice controllable systems(VCS). Prior work on attacking VCS shows
that the hidden voice commands that are incomprehensible to people can control
the systems. Hidden voice commands, though hidden, are nonetheless audible. In
this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that
modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve
inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits, the
modulated low frequency audio commands can be successfully demodulated,
recovered, and more importantly interpreted by the speech recognition systems.
We validate DolphinAttack on popular speech recognition systems, including
Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Huawei HiVoice, Cortana and Alexa. By
injecting a sequence of inaudible voice commands, we show a few
proof-of-concept attacks, which include activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime
call on iPhone, activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode,
and even manipulating the navigation system in an Audi automobile. We propose
hardware and software defense solutions. We validate that it is feasible to
detect DolphinAttack by classifying the audios using supported vector machine
(SVM), and suggest to re-design voice controllable systems to be resilient to
inaudible voice command attacks.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figure
Listening for Sirens: Locating and Classifying Acoustic Alarms in City Scenes
This paper is about alerting acoustic event detection and sound source
localisation in an urban scenario. Specifically, we are interested in spotting
the presence of horns, and sirens of emergency vehicles. In order to obtain a
reliable system able to operate robustly despite the presence of traffic noise,
which can be copious, unstructured and unpredictable, we propose to treat the
spectrograms of incoming stereo signals as images, and apply semantic
segmentation, based on a Unet architecture, to extract the target sound from
the background noise. In a multi-task learning scheme, together with signal
denoising, we perform acoustic event classification to identify the nature of
the alerting sound. Lastly, we use the denoised signals to localise the
acoustic source on the horizon plane, by regressing the direction of arrival of
the sound through a CNN architecture. Our experimental evaluation shows an
average classification rate of 94%, and a median absolute error on the
localisation of 7.5{\deg} when operating on audio frames of 0.5s, and of
2.5{\deg} when operating on frames of 2.5s. The system offers excellent
performance in particularly challenging scenarios, where the noise level is
remarkably high.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure
Interfacing PDM sensors with PFM spiking systems: application for Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors
In this paper we present a sub-system to convert
audio information from low-power MEMS microphones with
pulse density modulation (PDM) output into rate coded spike
streams. These spikes represent the input signal of a Neuromorphic
Auditory Sensor (NAS), which is implemented with Spike
Signal Processing (SSP) building blocks. For this conversion, we
have designed a HDL component for FPGA able to interface
with PDM microphones and converts their pulses to temporal
distributed spikes following a pulse frequency modulation (PFM)
scheme with an accurate configurable Inter-Spike-Interval. The
new FPGA component has been tested in two scenarios, first as a
stand-alone circuit for its characterization, and then it has been
integrated with a full NAS design to verify its behavior. This
PDM interface demands less than 1% of a Spartan 6 FPGA
resources and has a power consumption below 5mW.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-
Semi-Supervised Sound Source Localization Based on Manifold Regularization
Conventional speaker localization algorithms, based merely on the received
microphone signals, are often sensitive to adverse conditions, such as: high
reverberation or low signal to noise ratio (SNR). In some scenarios, e.g. in
meeting rooms or cars, it can be assumed that the source position is confined
to a predefined area, and the acoustic parameters of the environment are
approximately fixed. Such scenarios give rise to the assumption that the
acoustic samples from the region of interest have a distinct geometrical
structure. In this paper, we show that the high dimensional acoustic samples
indeed lie on a low dimensional manifold and can be embedded into a low
dimensional space. Motivated by this result, we propose a semi-supervised
source localization algorithm which recovers the inverse mapping between the
acoustic samples and their corresponding locations. The idea is to use an
optimization framework based on manifold regularization, that involves
smoothness constraints of possible solutions with respect to the manifold. The
proposed algorithm, termed Manifold Regularization for Localization (MRL), is
implemented in an adaptive manner. The initialization is conducted with only
few labelled samples attached with their respective source locations, and then
the system is gradually adapted as new unlabelled samples (with unknown source
locations) are received. Experimental results show superior localization
performance when compared with a recently presented algorithm based on a
manifold learning approach and with the generalized cross-correlation (GCC)
algorithm as a baseline
Spatial, Spectral, and Perceptual Nonlinear Noise Reduction for Hands-free Microphones in a Car
Speech enhancement in an automobile is a challenging problem because interference can come from engine noise, fans, music, wind, road noise, reverberation, echo, and passengers engaging in other conversations. Hands-free microphones make the situation worse because the strength of the desired speech signal reduces with increased distance between the microphone and talker. Automobile safety is improved when the driver can use a hands-free interface to phones and other devices instead of taking his eyes off the road. The demand for high quality hands-free communication in the automobile requires the introduction of more powerful algorithms. This thesis shows that a unique combination of five algorithms can achieve superior speech enhancement for a hands-free system when compared to beamforming or spectral subtraction alone. Several different designs were analyzed and tested before converging on the configuration that achieved the best results. Beamforming, voice activity detection, spectral subtraction, perceptual nonlinear weighting, and talker isolation via pitch tracking all work together in a complementary iterative manner to create a speech enhancement system capable of significantly enhancing real world speech signals. The following conclusions are supported by the simulation results using data recorded in a car and are in strong agreement with theory. Adaptive beamforming, like the Generalized Side-lobe Canceller (GSC), can be effectively used if the filters only adapt during silent data frames because too much of the desired speech is cancelled otherwise. Spectral subtraction removes stationary noise while perceptual weighting prevents the introduction of offensive audible noise artifacts. Talker isolation via pitch tracking can perform better when used after beamforming and spectral subtraction because of the higher accuracy obtained after initial noise removal. Iterating the algorithm once increases the accuracy of the Voice Activity Detection (VAD), which improves the overall performance of the algorithm. Placing the microphone(s) on the ceiling above the head and slightly forward of the desired talker appears to be the best location in an automobile based on the experiments performed in this thesis. Objective speech quality measures show that the algorithm removes a majority of the stationary noise in a hands-free environment of an automobile with relatively minimal speech distortion
Model-based estimation of in-car-communication feedback applied to speech zone detection
Modern cars provide versatile tools to enhance speech communication. While an
in-car communication (ICC) system aims at enhancing communication between the
passengers by playing back desired speech via loudspeakers in the car, these
loudspeaker signals may disturb a speech enhancement system required for
hands-free telephony and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we focus
on speech zone detection, i.e. detecting which passenger in the car is
speaking, which is a crucial component of the speech enhancement system. We
propose a model-based feedback estimation method to improve robustness of
speech zone detection against ICC feedback. Specifically, since the zone
detection system typically does not have access to the ICC loudspeaker signals,
the proposed method estimates the feedback signal from the observed microphone
signals based on a free-field propagation model between the loudspeakers and
the microphones as well as the ICC gain. We propose an efficient recursive
implementation in the short-time Fourier transform domain using convolutive
transfer functions. A realistic simulation study indicates that the proposed
method allows to increase the ICC gain by about 6dB while still achieving
robust speech zone detection results.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to International Workshop on Acoustic Signal
Enhancement (IWAENC), Bamberg, Germany, 202
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