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Robust Voice Activity Detector for Real World Applications Using Harmonicity and Modulation frequency. Ekapol Chuangsuwanich and James Glass MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,Cambridge , Massachusetts 02139,USA 2012/07/2 汪逸婷. Outline. Introduction Harmonicity
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Robust Voice Activity Detector for Real World Applications Using Harmonicity and Modulation frequency EkapolChuangsuwanich and James Glass MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139,USA 2012/07/2 汪逸婷
Outline • Introduction • Harmonicity • Modulation Frequency • Experiments and Discussions • Speech/Non-speech detection capabilities • Effect on ASR performance • Conclusion
Introduction • Voice Activity Detection(VAD) is the process of identifying segments of speech in a continuous audio stream. • First stage of a speech processing application. • Used to both reduce computation by eliminating unnecessary transmission and processing of non-speech segments, as well as reduce potential mis-recognition errors in such segments.(binary) • In this paper, we consider the task of giving commands to an autonomous forklift.
Introduction • In high quality recording conditions, energy-based methods perform well. • In noisy conditions, energy-based measures ofter produce a considerable number of false alarms. • Large variety of other features have been investigated for use in noisy environments. • Tuning parameters. • Difficulties dealing with non-stationary or instantaneous types of noises that are frequent in our work.
Introduction • Harmonicityis a basic property of any periodic signal, it is not useful by itself. • Some works shows good results even at very low SNR conditions. • Modulation frequencies which measure the temporal rate of change of energy across different frequency band. • Some studies about purely MF-inspired set of features for discriminating between speech and non-speech which gave good generalization to noise types not included in training.
Harmonicity • Figure 1: Example of distant speech from the forklift database.
Harmonicity • Autocorrelation :as a function of the lag • Periodicity measure will yield a high value for pure tones.(use bandpasscepstralliftering)
Experiments-Speech/Non-speech detection capabilities • Database consisting of speech commands from 26 subjects with added noise to simulate a variety of SNR values ranging from -5 to 15 dB. • Recorded with an array microphone. • Classification was without any additional post-processing. • Transition between speech and non-speech were excluded. • Training 4 min of speech, 22 min of non-speech.
Experiments-Speech/Non-speech detection capabilities • For comparison, include results based on Relative Spectral Entropy(RSE), Long-Term Signal Variability(LTSV), and statistical model-based VADs using MFCCs and MF as features to Gaussian mixtrue models(GMMs). • EER: Equal error rate • FAR: False alarm rate
Experiments-Speech/Non-speech detection capabilities • Performance varied specific kinds of noise.
Experiments-Speech/Non-speech detection capabilities • EER and FAR for each noise type are usually obtained at different thresholds.
Experiments-Effect on ASR performance • The SNR values ranged from 5 to 25 dB. • Corpus: four microphone channels, 10 hours long, 400 command words. • Commands are sparse, forklift is mostly idle waiting for commands or taking the time to executed commands. • ASR was performed using PocketSUMMIT, had a vocabulary size of 57 words, that out of domain(OOD) command was modeled by a single GMM. • ASR model was trained on over 3600 utterances of commands from 18 talkers.
Experiments-Effect on ASR performance • Examined the influence of different VAD systems on the ASR results in the task of commanding an autonomous forklift in real world environments.
Conclusion • Described the task of VAD on distant speech in low SNR environments for an autonomous robotic forklift. • Designed a two-stage approach for speech /non-speech classification. • Parallel SVM outperformed classification based on the whole MF spectrum. Combination MF and simple harmonicity measure helped reduce false alarm rate by another 9% at low miss rates. • In ASR, VAD outperformed standard VADs and achieved a WER very close to that of hand labeled end point.