Source and Filter Estimation for Throat-Microphone Speech Enhancement

In this paper, we propose a new statistical enhancement system for throat microphone recordings through source and filter separation. Throat microphones (TM) are skin-attached piezoelectric sensors that can capture speech sound signals in the form of tissue vibrations. Due to their limited bandwidth, TM recorded speech suffers from intelligibility and naturalness. In this paper, we investigate learning phone-dependent Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based statistical mappings using parallel recordings of acoustic microphone (AM) and TM for enhancement of the spectral envelope and excitation signals of the TM speech. The proposed mappings address the phone-dependent variability of tissue conduction with TM recordings. While the spectral envelope mapping estimates the line spectral frequency (LSF) representation of AM from TM recordings, the excitation mapping is constructed based on the spectral energy difference (SED) of AM and TM excitation signals. The excitation enhancement is modeled as an estimation of the SED features from the TM signal. The proposed enhancement system is evaluated using both objective and subjective tests. Objective evaluations are performed with the log-spectral distortion (LSD), the wideband perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and mean-squared error (MSE) metrics. Subjective evaluations are performed with an A/B comparison test. Experimental results indicate that the proposed phone-dependent mappings exhibit enhancements over phone-independent mappings. Furthermore enhancement of the TM excitation through statistical mappings of the SED features introduces significant objective and subjective performance improvements to the enhancement of TM recordings. ©2015 IEEE

Towards a cyber physical system for personalised and automatic OSA treatment

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a breathing disorder that takes place in the course of the sleep and is produced by a complete or a partial obstruction of the upper airway that manifests itself as frequent breathing stops and starts during the sleep. The real-time evaluation of whether or not a patient is undergoing OSA episode is a very important task in medicine in many scenarios, as for example for making instantaneous pressure adjustments that should take place when Automatic Positive Airway Pressure (APAP) devices are used during the treatment of OSA. In this paper the design of a possible Cyber Physical System (CPS) suited to real-time monitoring of OSA is described, and its software architecture and possible hardware sensing components are detailed. It should be emphasized here that this paper does not deal with a full CPS, rather with a software part of it under a set of assumptions on the environment. The paper also reports some preliminary experiments about the cognitive and learning capabilities of the designed CPS involving its use on a publicly available sleep apnea database

Towards a Multimodal Silent Speech Interface for European Portuguese

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the presence of environmental noise is still a hard problem to tackle in speech science (Ng et al., 2000). Another problem well described in the literature is the one concerned with elderly speech production. Studies (Helfrich, 1979) have shown evidence of a slower speech rate, more breaks, more speech errors and a humbled volume of speech, when comparing elderly with teenagers or adults speech, on an acoustic level. This fact makes elderly speech hard to recognize, using currently available stochastic based ASR technology. To tackle these two problems in the context of ASR for HumanComputer Interaction, a novel Silent Speech Interface (SSI) in European Portuguese (EP) is envisioned.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

I hear you eat and speak: automatic recognition of eating condition and food type, use-cases, and impact on ASR performance

We propose a new recognition task in the area of computational paralinguistics: automatic recognition of eating conditions in speech, i. e., whether people are eating while speaking, and what they are eating. To this end, we introduce the audio-visual iHEARu-EAT database featuring 1.6 k utterances of 30 subjects (mean age: 26.1 years, standard deviation: 2.66 years, gender balanced, German speakers), six types of food (Apple, Nectarine, Banana, Haribo Smurfs, Biscuit, and Crisps), and read as well as spontaneous speech, which is made publicly available for research purposes. We start with demonstrating that for automatic speech recognition (ASR), it pays off to know whether speakers are eating or not. We also propose automatic classification both by brute-forcing of low-level acoustic features as well as higher-level features related to intelligibility, obtained from an Automatic Speech Recogniser. Prediction of the eating condition was performed with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier employed in a leave-one-speaker-out evaluation framework. Results show that the binary prediction of eating condition (i. e., eating or not eating) can be easily solved independently of the speaking condition; the obtained average recalls are all above 90%. Low-level acoustic features provide the best performance on spontaneous speech, which reaches up to 62.3% average recall for multi-way classification of the eating condition, i. e., discriminating the six types of food, as well as not eating. The early fusion of features related to intelligibility with the brute-forced acoustic feature set improves the performance on read speech, reaching a 66.4% average recall for the multi-way classification task. Analysing features and classifier errors leads to a suitable ordinal scale for eating conditions, on which automatic regression can be performed with up to 56.2% determination coefficient

Multibiometric security in wireless communication systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 05/08/2010.This thesis has aimed to explore an application of Multibiometrics to secured wireless communications. The medium of study for this purpose included Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMAX, over which simulations and experimental studies were carried out to assess the performance. In specific, restriction of access to authorized users only is provided by a technique referred to hereafter as multibiometric cryptosystem. In brief, the system is built upon a complete challenge/response methodology in order to obtain a high level of security on the basis of user identification by fingerprint and further confirmation by verification of the user through text-dependent speaker recognition. First is the enrolment phase by which the database of watermarked fingerprints with memorable texts along with the voice features, based on the same texts, is created by sending them to the server through wireless channel. Later is the verification stage at which claimed users, ones who claim are genuine, are verified against the database, and it consists of five steps. Initially faced by the identification level, one is asked to first present one’s fingerprint and a memorable word, former is watermarked into latter, in order for system to authenticate the fingerprint and verify the validity of it by retrieving the challenge for accepted user. The following three steps then involve speaker recognition including the user responding to the challenge by text-dependent voice, server authenticating the response, and finally server accepting/rejecting the user. In order to implement fingerprint watermarking, i.e. incorporating the memorable word as a watermark message into the fingerprint image, an algorithm of five steps has been developed. The first three novel steps having to do with the fingerprint image enhancement (CLAHE with 'Clip Limit', standard deviation analysis and sliding neighborhood) have been followed with further two steps for embedding, and extracting the watermark into the enhanced fingerprint image utilising Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In the speaker recognition stage, the limitations of this technique in wireless communication have been addressed by sending voice feature (cepstral coefficients) instead of raw sample. This scheme is to reap the advantages of reducing the transmission time and dependency of the data on communication channel, together with no loss of packet. Finally, the obtained results have verified the claims

Toward enhancement of deep learning techniques using fuzzy logic: a survey

Deep learning has emerged recently as a type of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), it usually imitates the human way in gaining a particular knowledge type. Deep learning is considered an essential data science element, which comprises predictive modeling and statistics. Deep learning makes the processes of collecting, interpreting, and analyzing big data easier and faster. Deep neural networks are kind of ML models, where the non-linear processing units are layered for the purpose of extracting particular features from the inputs. Actually, the training process of similar networks is very expensive and it also depends on the used optimization method, hence optimal results may not be provided. The techniques of deep learning are also vulnerable to data noise. For these reasons, fuzzy systems are used to improve the performance of deep learning algorithms, especially in combination with neural networks. Fuzzy systems are used to improve the representation accuracy of deep learning models. This survey paper reviews some of the deep learning based fuzzy logic models and techniques that were presented and proposed in the previous studies, where fuzzy logic is used to improve deep learning performance. The approaches are divided into two categories based on how both of the samples are combined. Furthermore, the models' practicality in the actual world is revealed