4,689 research outputs found
Articulatory and bottleneck features for speaker-independent ASR of dysarthric speech
The rapid population aging has stimulated the development of assistive
devices that provide personalized medical support to the needies suffering from
various etiologies. One prominent clinical application is a computer-assisted
speech training system which enables personalized speech therapy to patients
impaired by communicative disorders in the patient's home environment. Such a
system relies on the robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to be
able to provide accurate articulation feedback. With the long-term aim of
developing off-the-shelf ASR systems that can be incorporated in clinical
context without prior speaker information, we compare the ASR performance of
speaker-independent bottleneck and articulatory features on dysarthric speech
used in conjunction with dedicated neural network-based acoustic models that
have been shown to be robust against spectrotemporal deviations. We report ASR
performance of these systems on two dysarthric speech datasets of different
characteristics to quantify the achieved performance gains. Despite the
remaining performance gap between the dysarthric and normal speech, significant
improvements have been reported on both datasets using speaker-independent ASR
architectures.Comment: to appear in Computer Speech & Language -
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2019.05.002 - arXiv admin note: substantial
text overlap with arXiv:1807.1094
DeepVOX: Discovering Features from Raw Audio for Speaker Recognition in Degraded Audio Signals
Automatic speaker recognition algorithms typically use pre-defined
filterbanks, such as Mel-Frequency and Gammatone filterbanks, for
characterizing speech audio. The design of these filterbanks is based on
domain-knowledge and limited empirical observations. The resultant features,
therefore, may not generalize well to different types of audio degradation. In
this work, we propose a deep learning-based technique to induce the filterbank
design from vast amounts of speech audio. The purpose of such a filterbank is
to extract features robust to degradations in the input audio. To this effect,
a 1D convolutional neural network is designed to learn a time-domain filterbank
called DeepVOX directly from raw speech audio. Secondly, an adaptive triplet
mining technique is developed to efficiently mine the data samples best suited
to train the filterbank. Thirdly, a detailed ablation study of the DeepVOX
filterbanks reveals the presence of both vocal source and vocal tract
characteristics in the extracted features. Experimental results on VOXCeleb2,
NIST SRE 2008 and 2010, and Fisher speech datasets demonstrate the efficacy of
the DeepVOX features across a variety of audio degradations, multi-lingual
speech data, and varying-duration speech audio. The DeepVOX features also
improve the performance of existing speaker recognition algorithms, such as the
xVector-PLDA and the iVector-PLDA
Anti-spoofing Methods for Automatic SpeakerVerification System
Growing interest in automatic speaker verification (ASV)systems has lead to
significant quality improvement of spoofing attackson them. Many research works
confirm that despite the low equal er-ror rate (EER) ASV systems are still
vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Inthis work we overview different acoustic
feature spaces and classifiersto determine reliable and robust countermeasures
against spoofing at-tacks. We compared several spoofing detection systems,
presented so far,on the development and evaluation datasets of the Automatic
SpeakerVerification Spoofing and Countermeasures (ASVspoof) Challenge
2015.Experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the useof
magnitude and phase information combination provides a substantialinput into
the efficiency of the spoofing detection systems. Also wavelet-based features
show impressive results in terms of equal error rate. Inour overview we compare
spoofing performance for systems based on dif-ferent classifiers. Comparison
results demonstrate that the linear SVMclassifier outperforms the conventional
GMM approach. However, manyresearchers inspired by the great success of deep
neural networks (DNN)approaches in the automatic speech recognition, applied
DNN in thespoofing detection task and obtained quite low EER for known and
un-known type of spoofing attacks.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figures, published in Springer Communications in Computer
and Information Science (CCIS) vol. 66
Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing
Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article
provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio
signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are
considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences
between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references,
and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature
representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep
learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants
of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific
neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas
are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music
information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and
tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio
enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis).
Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to
audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure
Physiologically-Motivated Feature Extraction Methods for Speaker Recognition
Speaker recognition has received a great deal of attention from the speech community, and significant gains in robustness and accuracy have been obtained over the past decade. However, the features used for identification are still primarily representations of overall spectral characteristics, and thus the models are primarily phonetic in nature, differentiating speakers based on overall pronunciation patterns. This creates difficulties in terms of the amount of enrollment data and complexity of the models required to cover the phonetic space, especially in tasks such as identification where enrollment and testing data may not have similar phonetic coverage. This dissertation introduces new features based on vocal source characteristics intended to capture physiological information related to the laryngeal excitation energy of a speaker. These features, including RPCC, GLFCC and TPCC, represent the unique characteristics of speech production not represented in current state-of-the-art speaker identification systems. The proposed features are evaluated through three experimental paradigms including cross-lingual speaker identification, cross song-type avian speaker identification and mono-lingual speaker identification. The experimental results show that the proposed features provide information about speaker characteristics that is significantly different in nature from the phonetically-focused information present in traditional spectral features. The incorporation of the proposed glottal source features offers significant overall improvement to the robustness and accuracy of speaker identification tasks
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Auditory-based processing of communication sounds
This thesis examines the possible benefits of adapting a biologically-inspired model of human auditory processing as part of a machine-hearing system. Features were generated by an auditory model, and used as input to machine learning systems to determine the content of the sound. Features were generated using the auditory image model (AIM) and were used for speech recognition and audio search. AIM comprises processing to simulate the human cochlea, and a ‘strobed temporal integration’ process which generates a stabilised auditory image (SAI) from the input sound.
The communication sounds which are produced by humans, other animals, and many musical instruments take the form of a pulse-resonance signal: pulses excite resonances in the body, and the resonance following each pulse contains information both about the type of object producing the sound and its size. In the case of humans, vocal tract length (VTL) determines the size properties of the resonance. In the speech recognition experiments, an auditory filterbank was combined with a Gaussian fitting procedure to produce features which are invariant to changes in speaker VTL. These features were compared against standard mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) in a size-invariant syllable recognition task. The VTL-invariant representation was found to produce better results than MFCCs when the system was trained on syllables from simulated talkers of one range of VTLs and tested on those from simulated talkers with a different range of VTLs.
The image stabilisation process of strobed temporal integration was analysed. Based on the properties of the auditory filterbank being used, theoretical constraints were placed on the properties of the dynamic thresholding function used to perform strobe detection. These constraints were used to specify a simple, yet robust, strobe detection algorithm. The syllable recognition system described above was then extended to produce features from profiles of the SAI and tested with the same syllable database as before. For clean speech, performance of the features was comparable to that of those generated from the filterbank output. However when pink noise was added to the stimuli, performance dropped more slowly as a function of signal-to-noise ratio when using the SAI-based AIM features, than when using either the filterbank-based features or the MFCCs, demonstrating the noise-robustness properties of the SAI representation.
The properties of the auditory filterbank in AIM were also analysed. Three models of the cochlea were considered: the static gammatone filterbank, dynamic compressive gammachirp (dcGC) and the pole-zero filter cascade (PZFC). The dcGC and gammatone are standard filterbank models, whereas the PZFC is a filter cascade, which more accurately models signal propagation in the cochlea. However, while the architecture of the filterbanks is different, they have all been successfully fitted to psychophysical masking data from humans. The abilities of the filterbanks to measure pitch strength were assessed, using stimuli which evoke a weak pitch percept in humans, in order to ascertain whether there is any benefit in the use of the more computationally efficient PZFC.
Finally, a complete sound effects search system using auditory features was constructed in collaboration with Google research. Features were computed from the SAI by sampling the SAI space with boxes of different scales. Vector quantization (VQ) was used to convert this multi-scale representation to a sparse code. The ‘passive-aggressive model for image retrieval’ (PAMIR) was used to learn the relationships between dictionary words and these auditory codewords. These auditory sparse codes were compared against sparse codes generated from MFCCs, and the best performance was found when using the auditory features
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