14,448 research outputs found
A novel neural feature for a text-dependent speaker identification system
A novel feature based on the simulated neural response of the auditory periphery was proposed in this study for a speaker identification system. A well-known computational model of the auditory-nerve (AN) fiber by Zilany and colleagues, which incorporates most of the stages and the relevant nonlinearities observed in the peripheral auditory system, was employed to simulate neural responses to speech signals from different speakers. Neurograms were constructed from responses of inner-hair-cell (IHC)-AN synapses with characteristic frequencies spanning the dynamic range of hearing. The synapse responses were subjected to an analytical function to incorporate the effects of absolute and relative refractory periods. The proposed IHC-AN neurogram feature was then used to train and test the text-dependent speaker identification system using standard classifiers. The performance of the proposed method was compared to the results from existing baseline methods for both quiet and noisy conditions. While the performance using the proposed feature was comparable to the results of existing methods in quiet environments, the neural feature exhibited a substantially better classification accuracy in noisy conditions, especially with white Gaussian and street noises. Also, the performance of the proposed system was relatively independent of various types of distortions in the acoustic signals and classifiers. The proposed feature can be employed to design a robust speech recognition system
Speaker Normalization Using Cortical Strip Maps: A Neural Model for Steady State vowel Categorization
Auditory signals of speech are speaker-dependent, but representations of language meaning are speaker-independent. The transformation from speaker-dependent to speaker-independent language representations enables speech to be learned and understood from different speakers. A neural model is presented that performs speaker normalization to generate a pitch-independent representation of speech sounds, while also preserving information about speaker identity. This speaker-invariant representation is categorized into unitized speech items, which input to sequential working memories whose distributed patterns can be categorized, or chunked, into syllable and word representations. The proposed model fits into an emerging model of auditory streaming and speech categorization. The auditory streaming and speaker normalization parts of the model both use multiple strip representations and asymmetric competitive circuits, thereby suggesting that these two circuits arose from similar neural designs. The normalized speech items are rapidly categorized and stably remembered by Adaptive Resonance Theory circuits. Simulations use synthesized steady-state vowels from the Peterson and Barney [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175-184 (1952)] vowel database and achieve accuracy rates similar to those achieved by human listeners. These results are compared to behavioral data and other speaker normalization models.National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624
Speaker Normalization Using Cortical Strip Maps: A Neural Model for Steady State Vowel Identification
Auditory signals of speech are speaker-dependent, but representations of language meaning are speaker-independent. Such a transformation enables speech to be understood from different speakers. A neural model is presented that performs speaker normalization to generate a pitchindependent representation of speech sounds, while also preserving information about speaker identity. This speaker-invariant representation is categorized into unitized speech items, which input to sequential working memories whose distributed patterns can be categorized, or chunked, into syllable and word representations. The proposed model fits into an emerging model of auditory streaming and speech categorization. The auditory streaming and speaker normalization parts of the model both use multiple strip representations and asymmetric competitive circuits, thereby suggesting that these two circuits arose from similar neural designs. The normalized speech items are rapidly categorized and stably remembered by Adaptive Resonance Theory circuits. Simulations use synthesized steady-state vowels from the Peterson and Barney [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175-184 (1952)] vowel database and achieve accuracy rates similar to those achieved by human listeners. These results are compared to behavioral data and other speaker normalization models.National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624
Speaker-normalized sound representations in the human auditory cortex
The acoustic dimensions that distinguish speech sounds (like the vowel differences in âbootâ and âboatâ) also differentiate speakersâ voices. Therefore, listeners must normalize across speakers without losing linguistic information. Past behavioral work suggests an important role for auditory contrast enhancement in normalization: preceding context affects listenersâ perception of subsequent speech sounds. Here, using intracranial electrocorticography in humans, we investigate whether and how such context effects arise in auditory cortex. Participants identified speech sounds that were preceded by phrases from two different speakers whose voices differed along the same acoustic dimension as target words (the lowest resonance of the vocal tract). In every participant, target vowels evoke a speaker-dependent neural response that is consistent with the listenerâs perception, and which follows from a contrast enhancement model. Auditory cortex processing thus displays a critical feature of normalization, allowing listeners to extract meaningful content from the voices of diverse speakers
A unified coding strategy for processing faces and voices
Both faces and voices are rich in socially-relevant information, which humans are remarkably adept at extracting, including a person's identity, age, gender, affective state, personality, etc. Here, we review accumulating evidence from behavioral, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies which suggest that the cognitive and neural processing mechanisms engaged by perceiving faces or voices are highly similar, despite the very different nature of their sensory input. The similarity between the two mechanisms likely facilitates the multi-modal integration of facial and vocal information during everyday social interactions. These findings emphasize a parsimonious principle of cerebral organization, where similar computational problems in different modalities are solved using similar solutions
How visual cues to speech rate influence speech perception
Spoken words are highly variable and therefore listeners interpret speech sounds relative to the surrounding acoustic context, such as the speech rate of a preceding sentence. For instance, a vowel midway between short /É/ and long /a:/ in Dutch is perceived as short /É/ in the context of preceding slow speech, but as long /a:/ if preceded by a fast context. Despite the well-established influence of visual articulatory cues on speech comprehension, it remains unclear whether visual cues to speech rate also influence subsequent spoken word recognition. In two âGo Fishâ-like experiments, participants were presented with audio-only (auditory speech + fixation cross), visual-only (mute videos of talking head), and audiovisual (speech + videos) context sentences, followed by ambiguous target words containing vowels midway between short /É/ and long /a:/. In Experiment 1, target words were always presented auditorily, without visual articulatory cues. Although the audio-only and audiovisual contexts induced a rate effect (i.e., more long /a:/ responses after fast contexts), the visual-only condition did not. When, in Experiment 2, target words were presented audiovisually, rate effects were observed in all three conditions, including visual-only. This suggests that visual cues to speech rate in a context sentence influence the perception of following visual target cues (e.g., duration of lip aperture), which at an audiovisual integration stage bias participantsâ target categorization responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how what we see influences what we hear
Look, Listen and Learn - A Multimodal LSTM for Speaker Identification
Speaker identification refers to the task of localizing the face of a person
who has the same identity as the ongoing voice in a video. This task not only
requires collective perception over both visual and auditory signals, the
robustness to handle severe quality degradations and unconstrained content
variations are also indispensable. In this paper, we describe a novel
multimodal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture which seamlessly unifies
both visual and auditory modalities from the beginning of each sequence input.
The key idea is to extend the conventional LSTM by not only sharing weights
across time steps, but also sharing weights across modalities. We show that
modeling the temporal dependency across face and voice can significantly
improve the robustness to content quality degradations and variations. We also
found that our multimodal LSTM is robustness to distractors, namely the
non-speaking identities. We applied our multimodal LSTM to The Big Bang Theory
dataset and showed that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems in
speaker identification with lower false alarm rate and higher recognition
accuracy.Comment: The 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16
Learning sound representations using trainable COPE feature extractors
Sound analysis research has mainly been focused on speech and music
processing. The deployed methodologies are not suitable for analysis of sounds
with varying background noise, in many cases with very low signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR). In this paper, we present a method for the detection of patterns
of interest in audio signals. We propose novel trainable feature extractors,
which we call COPE (Combination of Peaks of Energy). The structure of a COPE
feature extractor is determined using a single prototype sound pattern in an
automatic configuration process, which is a type of representation learning. We
construct a set of COPE feature extractors, configured on a number of training
patterns. Then we take their responses to build feature vectors that we use in
combination with a classifier to detect and classify patterns of interest in
audio signals. We carried out experiments on four public data sets: MIVIA audio
events, MIVIA road events, ESC-10 and TU Dortmund data sets. The results that
we achieved (recognition rate equal to 91.71% on the MIVIA audio events, 94% on
the MIVIA road events, 81.25% on the ESC-10 and 94.27% on the TU Dortmund)
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and are higher than the
ones obtained by other existing approaches. The COPE feature extractors have
high robustness to variations of SNR. Real-time performance is achieved even
when the value of a large number of features is computed.Comment: Accepted for publication in Pattern Recognitio
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