Delay Estimator and Improved Proportionate Multi-Delay Adaptive Filtering Algorithm

This paper pertains to speech and acoustic signal processing, and particularly to a determination of echo path delay and operation of echo cancellers. To cancel long echoes, the number of weights in a conventional adaptive filter must be large. The length of the adaptive filter will directly affect both the degree of accuracy and the convergence speed of the adaptation process. We present a new adaptive structure which is capable to deal with multiple dispersive echo paths. An adaptive filter according to the present invention includes means for storing an impulse response in a memory, the impulse response being indicative of the characteristics of a transmission line. It also includes a delay estimator for detecting ranges of samples within the impulse response having relatively large distribution of echo energy. These ranges of samples are being indicative of echoes on the transmission line. An adaptive filter has a plurality of weighted taps, each of the weighted taps having an associated tap weight value. A tap allocation/control circuit establishes the tap weight values in response to said detecting means so that only taps within the regions of relatively large distributions of echo energy are turned on. Thus, the convergence speed and the degree of estimation in the adaptation process can be improved

Voice Activity Detection for Speech Enhancement Applications

This paper describes a study of noise-robust voice activity detection (VAD) utilizing the periodicity of the signal, full band signal energy and high band to low band signal energy ratio. Conventional VADs are sensitive to a variably noisy environment especially with low SNR, and also result in cutting off unvoiced regions of speech as well as random oscillating of output VAD decisions. To overcome these problems, the proposed algorithm first identifies voiced regions of speech and then differentiates unvoiced regions from silence or background noise using the energy ratio and total signal energy. The performance of the proposed VAD algorithm is tested on real speech signals. Comparisons confirm that the proposed VAD algorithm outperforms the conventional VAD algorithms, especially in the presence of background noise

A simple but efficient voice activity detection algorithm through Hilbert transform and dynamic threshold for speech pathologies

A simple but efficient voice activity detector based on the Hilbert transform and a dynamic threshold is presented to be used on the pre-processing of audio signals -- The algorithm to define the dynamic threshold is a modification of a convex combination found in literature -- This scheme allows the detection of prosodic and silence segments on a speech in presence of non-ideal conditions like a spectral overlapped noise -- The present work shows preliminary results over a database built with some political speech -- The tests were performed adding artificial noise to natural noises over the audio signals, and some algorithms are compared -- Results will be extrapolated to the field of adaptive filtering on monophonic signals and the analysis of speech pathologies on futures works20th Argentinean Bioengineering Society Congress, SABI 2015 (XX Congreso Argentino de Bioingeniería y IX Jornadas de Ingeniería Clínica)28–30 October 2015, San Nicolás de los Arroyos, Argentin