Publication detail

Noise-robust speech triage

BARTOS, A. CIPR, T. NELSON, D. SCHWARZ, P. BANOWETZ, J. JERABEK, L.

Original Title

Noise-robust speech triage

Type

journal article in Web of Science

Language

English

Original Abstract

A method is presented in which conventional speech algorithms are applied, with no modifications, to improve their performance in extremely noisy environments. It has been demonstrated that, for eigen-channel algorithms, pre-training multiple speaker identification (SID) models at a lattice of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) levels and then performing SID using the appropriate SNR dependent model was successful in mitigating noise at all SNR levels. In those tests, it was found that SID performance was optimized when the SNR of the testing and training data were close or identical. In this current effort multiple i-vector algorithms were used, greatly improving both processing throughput and equal error rate classification accuracy. Using identical approaches in the same noisy environment, performance of SID, language identification, gender identification, and diarization were significantly improved. A critical factor in this improvement is speech activity detection (SAD) that performs reliably in extremely noisy environments, where the speech itself is barely audible. To optimize SAD operation at all SNR levels, two algorithms were employed. The first maximized detection probability at low levels (10 dB  SNR < 10 dB) using just the voiced speech envelope, and the second exploited features extracted from the original speech to improve overall accuracy at higher quality levels (SNR10 dB).

Keywords

speech algorithms, noisy environments, multiple speaker identification

Authors

BARTOS, A.; CIPR, T.; NELSON, D.; SCHWARZ, P.; BANOWETZ, J.; JERABEK, L.

Released

23. 4. 2018

ISBN

1520-8524

Periodical

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Year of study

143

Number

4

State

United States of America

Pages from

2313

Pages to

2320

Pages count

8

URL

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5031029

BibTex

@article{BUT147194,
  author="Anthony {Bartos} and Tomáš {Cipr} and Douglas {Nelson} and Petr {Schwarz} and John {Banowetz} and Ladislav {Jerabek}",
  title="Noise-robust speech triage",
  journal="Journal of the Acoustical Society of America",
  year="2018",
  volume="143",
  number="4",
  pages="2313--2320",
  doi="10.1121/1.5031029",
  issn="1520-8524",
  url="https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5031029"
}