Interactive game for the training of portuguese vowels

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Automatic speech recognition: from study to practice

Today, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is widely used for different purposes such as robotics, multimedia, medical and industrial application. Although many researches have been performed in this field in the past decades, there is still a lot of room to work. In order to start working in this area, complete knowledge of ASR systems as well as their weak points and problems is inevitable. Besides that, practical experience improves the theoretical knowledge understanding in a reliable way. Regarding to these facts, in this master thesis, we have first reviewed the principal structure of the standard HMM-based ASR systems from technical point of view. This includes, feature extraction, acoustic modeling, language modeling and decoding. Then, the most significant challenging points in ASR systems is discussed. These challenging points address different internal components characteristics or external agents which affect the ASR systems performance. Furthermore, we have implemented a Spanish language recognizer using HTK toolkit. Finally, two open research lines according to the studies of different sources in the field of ASR has been suggested for future work

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Discriminative connectionist approaches for automatic speech recognition in cars

The first part of this thesis is devoted to the evaluation of approaches which exploit the inherent redundancy of the speech signal to improve the noise robustness. On the basis of this evaluation on the AURORA 2000 database, we further study in detail two of the evaluated approaches. The first of these approaches is the hybrid RBF/HMM approach, which is an attempt to combine the superior classification performance of radial basis functions (RBFs) with the ability of HMMs to model time variation. The second approach is using neural networks to non-linearly reduce the dimensionality of large feature vectors including context frames. We propose the use of different MLP topologies for that purpose. Experiments on the AURORA 2000 database reveal that the performance of the first approach is similar to the performance of systems based on SCHMMs. The second approach cannot outperform the performance of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) on a database recorded in real car environments, but it is on average significantly better than LDA on the AURORA 2000 database.Im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit werden bestehende Verfahren zur Erhöhung der Robustheit von Spracherkennungssystemen in lauten Umgebungen evaluiert, die auf der Ausnutzung der Redundanz im Sprachsignal basieren. Auf der Grundlage dieser Evaluation auf der AURORA 2000 Datenbank werden zwei spezielle Ansätze weiter ausgearbeitet und detalliert analysiert. Der erste dieser Ansätze verbindet die herausragende Klassifikationsleistung von neuronalen Netzen mit radialen Basisfunktionen (RBF) mit der Fähigkeit von Hidden-Markov-Modellen (HMM), Zeitveränderlichkeiten zu modellieren. In einem zweiten Ansatz werden NN zur nichtlinearen Dimensionsreduktion hochdimensionaler Kontextvektoren in unterschiedlichen Netzwerk-Topologien untersucht. In Experimenten konnte gezeigt werden, dass der erste dieser Ansätze für die AURORA-Datenbank eine ähnliche Leistungsfähigkeit wie semikontinuierliche HMM (SCHMM) aufweist. Der zweite Ansatz erzielt auf einer im Kraftfahrzeug aufgenommenen Datenbank keine Verbesserung gegenüber den klassischen linearen Ansätzen zu Dimensionsreduktion (LDA), erweist sich aber auf der AURORA-Datenbank als signifikan

Robust speech recognition under band-limited channels and other channel distortions

Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, junio de 200