Recognizing Voice Over IP: A Robust Front-End for Speech Recognition on the World Wide Web

The Internet Protocol (IP) environment poses two relevant sources of distortion to the speech recognition problem: lossy speech coding and packet loss. In this paper, we propose a new front-end for speech recognition over IP networks. Specifically, we suggest extracting the recognition feature vectors directly from the encoded speech (i.e., the bit stream) instead of decoding it and subsequently extracting the feature vectors. This approach offers two significant benefits. First, the recognition system is only affected by the quantization distortion of the spectral envelope. Thus, we are avoiding the influence of other sources of distortion due to the encoding-decoding process. Second, when packet loss occurs, our front-end becomes more effective since it is not constrained to the error handling mechanism of the codec. We have considered the ITU G.723.1 standard codec, which is one of the most preponderant coding algorithms in voice over IP (VoIP) and compared the proposed front-end with the conventional approach in two automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks, namely, speaker-independent isolated digit recognition and speaker-independent continuous speech recognition. In general, our approach outperforms the conventional procedure, for a variety of simulated packet loss rates. Furthermore, the improvement is higher as network conditions worsen.Publicad

Improvements on stochastic vector quantization of images

A novel nonadaptive fixed-rate vector quantizer encoding scheme is presented, and preliminary results are shown. The design of the codebook has been based on a stochastic approach in order to match a previously defined model for the image to be encoded. Following this approach, the generation of the codebook is made extremely simple in terms of computational load. Good visual results are shown in the range of 0.5-0.8 bit/pixel. Much better performance is expected for adaptive schemes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Distributed Representation of Geometrically Correlated Images with Compressed Linear Measurements

This paper addresses the problem of distributed coding of images whose correlation is driven by the motion of objects or positioning of the vision sensors. It concentrates on the problem where images are encoded with compressed linear measurements. We propose a geometry-based correlation model in order to describe the common information in pairs of images. We assume that the constitutive components of natural images can be captured by visual features that undergo local transformations (e.g., translation) in different images. We first identify prominent visual features by computing a sparse approximation of a reference image with a dictionary of geometric basis functions. We then pose a regularized optimization problem to estimate the corresponding features in correlated images given by quantized linear measurements. The estimated features have to comply with the compressed information and to represent consistent transformation between images. The correlation model is given by the relative geometric transformations between corresponding features. We then propose an efficient joint decoding algorithm that estimates the compressed images such that they stay consistent with both the quantized measurements and the correlation model. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively estimates the correlation between images in multi-view datasets. In addition, the proposed algorithm provides effective decoding performance that compares advantageously to independent coding solutions as well as state-of-the-art distributed coding schemes based on disparity learning

Analysis-by-Synthesis-based Quantization of Compressed Sensing Measurements

We consider a resource-constrained scenario where a compressed sensing- (CS) based sensor has a low number of measurements which are quantized at a low rate followed by transmission or storage. Applying this scenario, we develop a new quantizer design which aims to attain a high-quality reconstruction performance of a sparse source signal based on analysis-by-synthesis framework. Through simulations, we compare the performance of the proposed quantization algorithm vis-a-vis existing quantization methods.Comment: 5 pages, Published in ICASSP 201

A robust CELP coder with source-dependent channel coding

A CELP coder using Source Dependent Channel Encoding (SDCE) for optimal channel error protection is introduced. With SDCE, each of the CELP parameters are encoded by minimizing a perceptually meaningful error criterion under prevalent channel conditions. Unlike conventional channel coding schemes, SDCE allows for optimal balance between error detection and correction. The experimental results show that the CELP system is robust under various channel bit error rates and displays a graceful degradation in SSNR as the channel error rate increases. This is a desirable property to have in a coder since the exact channel conditions cannot usually be specified a priori

Robust vector quantization for noisy channels

The paper briefly discusses techniques for making vector quantizers more tolerant to tranmsission errors. Two algorithms are presented for obtaining an efficient binary word assignment to the vector quantizer codewords without increasing the transmission rate. It is shown that about 4.5 dB gain over random assignment can be achieved with these algorithms. It is also proposed to reduce the effects of error propagation in vector-predictive quantizers by appropriately constraining the response of the predictive loop. The constrained system is shown to have about 4 dB of SNR gain over an unconstrained system in a noisy channel, with a small loss of clean-channel performance