Youngjoo Suh

Probabilistic Class Histogram Equalization for Robust Speech Recognition

In this letter, a probabilistic class histogram equalization method is proposed to compensate for an acoustic mismatch in noise robust speech recognition. The proposed method aims not only to compensate for the acoustic mismatch between training and test environments but also to reduce the limitations of the conventional histogram equalization. It utilizes multiple class-specific reference and test cumulative distribution functions, classifies noisy test features into their corresponding classes by means of soft classification with a Gaussian mixture model, and equalizes the features by using their corresponding class-specific distributions. Experiments on the Aurora 2 task confirm the superiority of the proposed approach in acoustic feature compensation

Multiple Acoustic Model-Based Discriminative Likelihood Ratio Weighting for Voice Activity Detection

In this letter, we propose a novel statistical voice activity detection (VAD) technique. The proposed technique employs probabilistically derived multiple acoustic models to effectively optimize the weights on frequency domain likelihood ratios with the discriminative training approach for more accurate voice activity detection. Experiments performed on various AURORA noisy environments showed that the proposed approach produces meaningful performance improvements over the single acoustic model-based conventional approaches.

Compensating acoustic mismatch using class-based histogram equalization for robust speech recognition

A new class-based histogram equalization method is proposed for robust speech recognition. The proposed method aims at not only compensating for an acoustic mismatch between training and test environments but also reducing the two fundamental limitations of the conventional histogram equalization method, the discrepancy between the phonetic distributions of training and test speech data, and the nonmonotonic transformation caused by the acoustic mismatch. The algorithm employs multiple class-specific reference and test cumulative distribution functions, classifies noisy test features into their corresponding classes, and equalizes the features by using their corresponding class reference and test distributions. The minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude (MMSE-LSA)-based speech enhancement is added just prior to the baseline feature extraction to reduce the corruption by additive noise. The experiments on the Aurora2 database proved the effectiveness of the proposed method by reducing relative errors by over the mel-cepstral-based features and by over the conventional histogram equalization method, respectively.

Histogram equalization to model adaptation for robust speech recognition

We propose a new model adaptation method based on the histogram equalization technique for providing robustness in noisy environments. The trained acoustic mean models of a speech recognizer are adapted into environmentally matched conditions by using the histogram equalization algorithm on a single utterance basis. For more robust speech recognition in the heavily noisy conditions, trained acoustic covariance models are efficiently adapted by the signal-to-noise ratio-dependent linear interpolation between trained covariance models and utterance-level sample covariance models. Speech recognition experiments on both the digit-based Aurora2 task and the large vocabulary-based task showed that the proposed model adaptation approach provides significant performance improvements compared to the baseline speech recognizer trained on the clean speech data.

Environmental Model Adaptation Based on Histogram Equalization

In this letter, a new environmental model adaptation method is proposed for robust speech recognition under noisy environments. The proposed method adapts initial acoustic models of a speech recognizer into environmentally matched models by utilizing the histogram equalization technique. Experiments performed on the Aurora noisy environment showed that the proposed technique provides substantial improvement over the baseline speech recognizer trained on the clean speech data.

Histogram Equalization Utilizing Window-Based Smoothed CDF Estimation for Feature Compensation

In this letter, we propose a new histogram equalization method to compensate for acoustic mismatches mainly caused by corruption of additive noise and channel distortion in speech recognition. The proposed method employs an improved test cumulative distribution function (CDF) by more accurately smoothing the conventional order statistics-based test CDF with the use of window functions for robust feature compensation. Experiments on the AURORA 2 framework confirmed that the proposed method is effective in compensating speech recognition features by reducing the averaged relative error by 13.12% over the order statistics-based conventional histogram equalization method and by 58.02% over the mel-cepstral-based features for the three test sets.

Noise Robust Speaker Identification Using Sub-Band Weighting in Multi-Band Approach

Recently, many techniques have been proposed to improve speaker identification in noise environments. Among these techniques, we consider the feature recombination technique for the multi-band approach in noise robust speaker identification. The conventional feature recombination technique is very effective in the band-limited noise condition, but in broad-band noise condition, the conventional feature recombination technique does not provide notable performance improvement compared with the full-band system. Even though the speech is corrupted by the broad-band noise, the degree of the noise corruption on each sub-band is different from each other. In the conventional feature recombination for speaker identification, all sub-band features are used to compute multi-band likelihood score, but this likelihood computation does not use a merit of multi-band approach effectively, even though the sub-band features are extracted independently. Here we propose a new technique of sub-band likelihood computation with sub-band weighting in the feature recombination method. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) is used to compute the sub-band weights. The proposed sub-band-weighted likelihood computation makes a speaker identification system more robust to noise. Experimental results show that the average error reduction rate (ERR) in various noise environments is more than 24% compared with the conventional feature recombination-based speaker identification system.

Probabilistic Class Histogram Equalization Based on Posterior Mean Estimation for Robust Speech Recognition

In this letter, we propose a new probabilistic class histogram equalization technique for noise robust speech recognition. To cope with the sparse data problem which is common in the case of short test data, the proposed histogram equalization technique employs the posterior mean estimator, a kind of the Bayesian estimator, for test CDF. Experiments on the Aurora-4 framework showed that the proposed method produces performance improvement over the conventional maximum likelihood estimation-based approach.

Discriminative likelihood score weighting based on acoustic-phonetic classification for speaker identification

In this paper, a new discriminative likelihood score weighting technique is proposed for speaker identification. The proposed method employs a discriminative weighting of frame-level log-likelihood scores with acoustic-phonetic classification in the Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based speaker identification. Experiments performed on the Aurora noise-corrupted TIMIT database showed that the proposed approach provides meaningful performance improvement with an overall relative error reduction of 15.8% over the maximum likelihood-based baseline GMM approach.

Minimum classification error-based weighted support vector machine kernels for speaker verification

Support vector machines (SVMs) have been proved to be an effective approach to speaker verification. An appropriate selection of the kernel function is a key issue in SVM-based classification. In this letter, a new SVM-based speaker verification method utilizing weighted kernels in the Gaussian mixture model supervector space is proposed. The weighted kernels are derived by using the discriminative training approach, which minimizes speaker verification errors. Experiments performed on the NIST 2008 speaker recognition evaluation task showed that the proposed approach provides substantially improved performance over the baseline kernel-based method.