Speech Processing in Computer Vision Applications

Deep learning has been recently proven to be a viable asset in determining features in the field of Speech Analysis. Deep learning methods like Convolutional Neural Networks facilitate the expansion of specific feature information in waveforms, allowing networks to create more feature dense representations of data. Our work attempts to address the problem of re-creating a face given a speaker\u27s voice and speaker identification using deep learning methods. In this work, we first review the fundamental background in speech processing and its related applications. Then we introduce novel deep learning-based methods to speech feature analysis. Finally, we will present our deep learning approaches to speaker identification and speech to face synthesis. The presented method can convert a speaker audio sample to an image of their predicted face. This framework is composed of several chained together networks, each with an essential step in the conversion process. These include Audio embedding, encoding, and face generation networks, respectively. Our experiments show that certain features can map to the face and that with a speaker\u27s voice, DNNs can create their face and that a GUI could be used in conjunction to display a speaker recognition network\u27s data

On Using Backpropagation for Speech Texture Generation and Voice Conversion

Inspired by recent work on neural network image generation which rely on backpropagation towards the network inputs, we present a proof-of-concept system for speech texture synthesis and voice conversion based on two mechanisms: approximate inversion of the representation learned by a speech recognition neural network, and on matching statistics of neuron activations between different source and target utterances. Similar to image texture synthesis and neural style transfer, the system works by optimizing a cost function with respect to the input waveform samples. To this end we use a differentiable mel-filterbank feature extraction pipeline and train a convolutional CTC speech recognition network. Our system is able to extract speaker characteristics from very limited amounts of target speaker data, as little as a few seconds, and can be used to generate realistic speech babble or reconstruct an utterance in a different voice.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201

Deep Multimodal Speaker Naming

Automatic speaker naming is the problem of localizing as well as identifying each speaking character in a TV/movie/live show video. This is a challenging problem mainly attributes to its multimodal nature, namely face cue alone is insufficient to achieve good performance. Previous multimodal approaches to this problem usually process the data of different modalities individually and merge them using handcrafted heuristics. Such approaches work well for simple scenes, but fail to achieve high performance for speakers with large appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) based learning framework to automatically learn the fusion function of both face and audio cues. We show that without using face tracking, facial landmark localization or subtitle/transcript, our system with robust multimodal feature extraction is able to achieve state-of-the-art speaker naming performance evaluated on two diverse TV series. The dataset and implementation of our algorithm are publicly available online

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