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

Numerical simulation of transfer and attenuation characteristics of soft-tissue conducted sound originating from vocal tract

A non-audible murmur (NAM), a very weak speech sound produced without vocal cord vibration, can be detected by a special NAM microphone attached to the neck, thereby providing a new speech communication tool for functional speech disorders as well as human-to-machine and human-to-human interfaces with inaudible voice input for use with unimpaired. The NAM microphone is a condenser microphone covered with soft-silicone impression material that provides good impedance matching with the soft tissues of the neck. Because higher-frequency components are suppressed severely, however, the NAM detected with this device can be insufficiently clear. To improve NAM clarity, the mechanism of NAM production as well as the transfer characteristics of the NAM in soft neck tissues must be clarified. We have investigated sound propagation from the vocal tract to the neck surface, using a finite difference time domain method and a head model based on magnetic resonance imaging scans. Numerical results show that, compared to air-conducted sound detected in front of a mouth, soft-tissue-conducted sound attenuates 50 dB at 1 kHz, which consists of 30 dB full-range attenuation due to air-to-soft-tissues transmission loss and -10 dB/octave spectral decay due to a propagation loss in soft tissues. The decay agrees well with the spectral characteristics of the measured NAM. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.ArticleAPPLIED ACOUSTICS. 70(3):469-472 (2009)journal articl

EMG-to-Speech: Direct Generation of Speech from Facial Electromyographic Signals

The general objective of this work is the design, implementation, improvement and evaluation of a system that uses surface electromyographic (EMG) signals and directly synthesizes an audible speech output: EMG-to-speech