A Framework for Bioacoustic Vocalization Analysis Using Hidden Markov Models

Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as a recognition framework for automatic classification of animal vocalizations has a number of benefits, including the ability to handle duration variability through nonlinear time alignment, the ability to incorporate complex language or recognition constraints, and easy extendibility to continuous recognition and detection domains. In this work, we apply HMMs to several different species and bioacoustic tasks using generalized spectral features that can be easily adjusted across species and HMM network topologies suited to each task. This experimental work includes a simple call type classification task using one HMM per vocalization for repertoire analysis of Asian elephants, a language-constrained song recognition task using syllable models as base units for ortolan bunting vocalizations, and a stress stimulus differentiation task in poultry vocalizations using a non-sequential model via a one-state HMM with Gaussian mixtures. Results show strong performance across all tasks and illustrate the flexibility of the HMM framework for a variety of species, vocalization types, and analysis tasks

End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Activity Detection with Bimodal Recurrent Neural Models

Speech activity detection (SAD) plays an important role in current speech processing systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). SAD is particularly difficult in environments with acoustic noise. A practical solution is to incorporate visual information, increasing the robustness of the SAD approach. An audiovisual system has the advantage of being robust to different speech modes (e.g., whisper speech) or background noise. Recent advances in audiovisual speech processing using deep learning have opened opportunities to capture in a principled way the temporal relationships between acoustic and visual features. This study explores this idea proposing a \emph{bimodal recurrent neural network} (BRNN) framework for SAD. The approach models the temporal dynamic of the sequential audiovisual data, improving the accuracy and robustness of the proposed SAD system. Instead of estimating hand-crafted features, the study investigates an end-to-end training approach, where acoustic and visual features are directly learned from the raw data during training. The experimental evaluation considers a large audiovisual corpus with over 60.8 hours of recordings, collected from 105 speakers. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to absolute improvements up to 1.2% under practical scenarios over a VAD baseline using only audio implemented with deep neural network (DNN). The proposed approach achieves 92.7% F1-score when it is evaluated using the sensors from a portable tablet under noisy acoustic environment, which is only 1.0% lower than the performance obtained under ideal conditions (e.g., clean speech obtained with a high definition camera and a close-talking microphone).Comment: Submitted to Speech Communicatio

A Framework for Bioacoustic Vocalization Analysis Using Hidden Markov Models

Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as a recognition framework for automatic classification of animal vocalizations has a number of benefits, including the ability to handle duration variability through nonlinear time alignment, the ability to incorporate complex language or recognition constraints, and easy extendibility to continuous recognition and detection domains. In this work, we apply HMMs to several different species and bioacoustic tasks using generalized spectral features that can be easily adjusted across species and HMM network topologies suited to each task. This experimental work includes a simple call type classification task using one HMM per vocalization for repertoire analysis of Asian elephants, a language-constrained song recognition task using syllable models as base units for ortolan bunting vocalizations, and a stress stimulus differentiation task in poultry vocalizations using a non-sequential model via a one-state HMM with Gaussian mixtures. Results show strong performance across all tasks and illustrate the flexibility of the HMM framework for a variety of species, vocalization types, and analysis tasks

Multimodal person recognition for human-vehicle interaction

Next-generation vehicles will undoubtedly feature biometric person recognition as part of an effort to improve the driving experience. Today's technology prevents such systems from operating satisfactorily under adverse conditions. A proposed framework for achieving person recognition successfully combines different biometric modalities, borne out in two case studies

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research