Estimation de la longueur du conduit vocal pour l'inversion acoustique-articulatoire

National audienceLa géométrie complexe du conduit vocal rend le problème d'inversion acoustique-articulatoire difficile, notamment de par son caractère fortement mal-posé. La régularisation passe par l'ajout de contraintes, soit articulatoires (modèle articulatoire, nécessitant peu de paramètres, mais nécessitant d'être adapté à chaque locuteur), soit sur les valeurs des fonctions d'aires. Dans ce cas, la longueur du conduit vocal est généralement fixée à une certaine valeur arbitraire, ne permettant pas d'analyser des éventuelles protrusions ou des élongations/raccourcissements du pharynx. L'étude présentée ici propose une approche permettant d'estimer la longueur du conduit vocal de tout locuteur à partir de l'enregistrement du signal de parole. La méthode utilisée est une méthode analyse par synthèse consistant à retrouver la fonction d'aire générant les formants estimés du signal de parole du locuteur. Elle est effectuée à partir d'une fonction d'aire initiale que l'on modifie itérativement selon la méthode des fonctions de sensibilités, d'après la théorie développée par Fant et Pauli sur les perturbations de sections à l'intérieur du conduit vocal. Les travaux présent dans la littérature utilisant cette méthode imposent cependant une longueur fixe des fonctions d'aire, et par conséquent une longueur du conduit vocal fixe. Notre approche permet de régler ce problème en prenant en compte aussi les perturbations de longueur du conduit vocal. Une étude numérique et expérimentale permet de valider la technique dans le cas de voyelles orales du français

A multimodal real-time MRI articulatory corpus of French for speech research

In this work we describe the creation of ArtSpeechMRIfr: a real-time as well as static magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI, 3D MRI) database of the vocal tract. The database contains also processed data: denoised audio, its phonetically aligned annotation, articulatory contours, and vocal tract volume information , which provides a rich resource for speech research. The database is built on data from two male speakers of French. It covers a number of phonetic contexts in the controlled part, as well as spontaneous speech, 3D MRI scans of sustained vocalic articulations, and of the dental casts of the subjects. The corpus for rtMRI consists of 79 synthetic sentences constructed from a phonetized dictionary that makes possible to shorten the duration of acquisitions while keeping a very good coverage of the phonetic contexts which exist in French. The 3D MRI includes acquisitions for 12 French vowels and 10 consonants, each of which was pronounced in several vocalic contexts. Ar-ticulatory contours (tongue, jaw, epiglottis, larynx, velum, lips) as well as 3D volumes were manually drawn for a part of the images

Acoustic-phonetic decoding of speech : problems and solutions

Acoustic phonetic decoding of speech recognition constitutes a major step in the process of continuous speech recognition . This paper reminds the difficulties of the problem together with the main methods proposed so far in order to solve it . We then concentrate on the différent complementary approaches Chat have been investigated by our group : expert system based on spectrogram reading, recognition by phonetic triphones, connectionist model based on the cortical column unit and stochastic recognition without segmentation .Le décodage acoustico-phonétique constitue une étape importante en reconnaissance de la parole continue . Cet article rappelle d'abord les difficultés du problème et les principales méthodes qui ont été proposées pour le résoudre . Il présente ensuite les diverses approches complémentaires adoptées par notre équipe : système expert fondé sur l'activité de lecture de spectrogrammes, reconnaissance par triplets phonétiques, modèle connexionniste de colonne corticale et reconnaissance par méthode stochastique sans segmentation

Testing the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive systems

Self-Adaptive systems are software-intensive systems endowed with the ability to respond to a variety of changes that may occur in their environment, goals, or the system itself, by adapting their structure and behavior at run-time in an autonomous way. Controllers are complex components incorporated in self-adaptive systems, which are crucial to their function since they are in charge of adapting the target system by executing actions through effectors, based on information monitored by probes. However, although controllers are becoming critical in many application domains, so far very little has been done to assess their robustness. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive software systems, aiming to identify faults in their design. Our proposal considers the stateful nature of the controller, and identifies a set of robustness tests, which includes the provision of mutated inputs to the interfaces between the controller and the target system (i.e., probes). The feasibility of the approach is evaluated on Rainbow, a framework for architecture-based self-adaptation, and in the context of the Znn.com case study

MAFTIA Conceptual Model and Architecture

This document builds on the work reported in MAFTIA deliverable D1. It contains a refinement of the MAFTIA conceptual model and a discussion of the MAFTIA architecture. It also introduces the work done in WP6 on verification and assessment of security properties, which is reported on in more detail in MAFTIA deliverable D

Conceptual Model and Architecture of MAFTIA

This deliverable builds on the work reported in [MAFTIA 2000] and [Powell and Stroud 2001]. It contains a further refinement of the MAFTIA conceptual model and a revised discussion of the MAFTIA architecture. It also introduces the work done in MAFTIA on verification and assessment of security properties, which is reported on in more detail in [Adelsbach and Creese 2003