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Book Auditory Processing for Speech Intelligibility Improvement

Download or read book Auditory Processing for Speech Intelligibility Improvement written by Jerry V. Tobias and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Auditory Processing for Speech Intelligibility Improvement

Download or read book Auditory Processing for Speech Intelligibility Improvement written by Jerry V. Tobias and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pilots of light aircraft often seem to prefer loudspeakers to earphones even though covering the ears helps most of them to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of speech transmissions, and to decrease the pilot's exposure to fatiguing noise. The auditory-fatigue problem can be handled by pilot education; the problem of deteriorating signal-to-noise ratios, though, can be approached not just by putting earphones on fliers but also by applying to the loudspeaker situation some of the theoretical principles that have led to techniques of apparent signal-level improvement and real speech-intelligibility improvement under earphones. The human auditory system, appropriately stimulated, is capable of creating the effect of an improved signal-to-noise ratio without actually changing either the signal or the noise intensities. Tests of these techniques show that their proper application to a loudspeaker-listening situation is equivalent to a 5-dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio. Since the method is based in the human observer's signal-processing ability, it requires no special equipment in the aircraft. Two loudspeakers are used, driven from the same signal source, but with the two speakers wired in opposite phase to each other. Within broad limits, variations in speaker placement permit the improved results. These limits are defined. (Author).

Book Speech Enhancement

Download or read book Speech Enhancement written by Philipos C. Loizou and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-02-25 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the proliferation of mobile devices and hearing devices, including hearing aids and cochlear implants, there is a growing and pressing need to design algorithms that can improve speech intelligibility without sacrificing quality. Responding to this need, Speech Enhancement: Theory and Practice, Second Edition introduces readers to the basic problems of speech enhancement and the various algorithms proposed to solve these problems. Updated and expanded, this second edition of the bestselling textbook broadens its scope to include evaluation measures and enhancement algorithms aimed at improving speech intelligibility. Fundamentals, Algorithms, Evaluation, and Future Steps Organized into four parts, the book begins with a review of the fundamentals needed to understand and design better speech enhancement algorithms. The second part describes all the major enhancement algorithms and, because these require an estimate of the noise spectrum, also covers noise estimation algorithms. The third part of the book looks at the measures used to assess the performance, in terms of speech quality and intelligibility, of speech enhancement methods. It also evaluates and compares several of the algorithms. The fourth part presents binary mask algorithms for improving speech intelligibility under ideal conditions. In addition, it suggests steps that can be taken to realize the full potential of these algorithms under realistic conditions. What’s New in This Edition Updates in every chapter A new chapter on objective speech intelligibility measures A new chapter on algorithms for improving speech intelligibility Real-world noise recordings (on accompanying CD) MATLAB® code for the implementation of intelligibility measures (on accompanying CD) MATLAB and C/C++ code for the implementation of algorithms to improve speech intelligibility (on accompanying CD) Valuable Insights from a Pioneer in Speech Enhancement Clear and concise, this book explores how human listeners compensate for acoustic noise in noisy environments. Written by a pioneer in speech enhancement and noise reduction in cochlear implants, it is an essential resource for anyone who wants to implement or incorporate the latest speech enhancement algorithms to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech degraded by noise. Includes a CD with Code and Recordings The accompanying CD provides MATLAB implementations of representative speech enhancement algorithms as well as speech and noise databases for the evaluation of enhancement algorithms.

Book Factors Affecting Speech Intelligibility Improvement with Exposure to Reverberant Room Listening Environments

Download or read book Factors Affecting Speech Intelligibility Improvement with Exposure to Reverberant Room Listening Environments written by Eugene Brandewie and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech intelligibility has been found to improve with prior exposure to a reverberant room environment. It is believed that perceptual mechanisms help maintain accurate speech perception under these adverse conditions. Potential factors underlying this speech enhancement effect were examined in three experiments. Experiment 1 studied the time course of speech intelligibility enhancement in multiple room environments. Carrier phrases of varying lengths were used to measure changes in speech intelligibility over time. Results showed an effect of speech enhancement with a time course that varied with the signal-to-noise ratio between the speech and a broad-band noise masker. Additionally, greater speech enhancement was found for reverberant environments compared to anechoic space, which suggests that a de-reverberation mechanism in the auditory system may enhance the temporal processing of speech. Experiment 2 examined the influence of the specific source and listener position within the room environment on speech enhancement. Source and listener configurations in three virtual room environments were altered to create a disparity between the position of a carrier phrase and a following speech target. Results showed robust effects of speech enhancement when the source and listener configuration were mismatched which suggests that speech enhancement relies on the general decay pattern of the room environment and not the specific temporal/spatial configuration of early reflections. Experiment 3 assessed the relationships between room-associated speech enhancement and single-reflection echo suppression by measuring echo thresholds for both a traditional click-based stimuli and with speech materials. Echo thresholds were found to be uncorrelated with the results of Experiment I. This suggests that early reflections have little impact on the de-reverberation aspect of speech enhancement, which is consistent with the results from Experiment II. A two-process hypothesis is proposed to account for the results of these experiments as well as previous research on this topic. Prior exposure to a speech pattern provided via carrier phrases is argued to elicit improved temporal processing of speech that results in speech enhancement. It is also argued that a process of de-reverberation effectively reduces the attenuation of temporal information in room environments.

Book Articulation and Intelligibility

Download or read book Articulation and Intelligibility written by Jont B. Allen and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately following the Second World War, between 1947 and 1955, several classic papers quantified the fundamentals of human speech information processing and recognition. In 1947 French and Steinberg published their classic study on the articulation index. In 1948 Claude Shannon published his famous work on the theory of information. In 1950 Fletcher and Galt published their theory of the articulation index, a theory that Fletcher had worked on for 30 years, which integrated his classic works on loudness and speech perception with models of speech intelligibility. In 1951 George Miller then wrote the first book Language and Communication, analyzing human speech communication with Claude Shannon's just published theory of information. Finally in 1955 George Miller published the first extensive analysis of phone decoding, in the form of confusion matrices, as a function of the speech-to-noise ratio. This work extended the Bell Labs' speech articulation studies with ideas from Shannon's Information theory. Both Miller and Fletcher showed that speech, as a code, is incredibly robust to mangling distortions of filtering and noise. Regrettably much of this early work was forgotten. While the key science of information theory blossomed, other than the work of George Miller, it was rarely applied to aural speech research. The robustness of speech, which is the most amazing thing about the speech code, has rarely been studied. It is my belief (i.e., assumption) that we can analyze speech intelligibility with the scientific method. The quantitative analysis of speech intelligibility requires both science and art. The scientific component requires an error analysis of spoken communication, which depends critically on the use of statistics, information theory, and psychophysical methods. The artistic component depends on knowing how to restrict the problem in such a way that progress may be made. It is critical to tease out the relevant from the irrelevant and dig for the key issues. This will focus us on the decoding of nonsense phonemes with no visual component, which have been mangled by filtering and noise. This monograph is a summary and theory of human speech recognition. It builds on and integrates the work of Fletcher, Miller, and Shannon. The long-term goal is to develop a quantitative theory for predicting the recognition of speech sounds. In Chapter 2 the theory is developed for maximum entropy (MaxEnt) speech sounds, also called nonsense speech. In Chapter 3, context is factored in. The book is largely reflective, and quantitative, with a secondary goal of providing an historical context, along with the many deep insights found in these early works.

Book Voice Technologies for Speech Reconstruction and Enhancement

Download or read book Voice Technologies for Speech Reconstruction and Enhancement written by Hemant A. Patil and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores new ways to reconstruct and enhance speech that is compromised by various neuro-motor disorders – collectively known as “dysarthria.” The authors address some of the extant lacunae in speech research of dysarthric conditions: they show how new methods can improve speaker recognition when speech is impaired due to developmental or acquired pathologies; they present a novel multi-dimensional approach to help the speech system both assess dysarthric speech and to perform intelligibility improvement of the impaired speech; they display well-performing software solutions for developmental and acquired speech impairments, and for vocal injuries; and they examine non-acoustic signals and muted nonverbal sounds in relation to audible speech conversion.

Book Improving Speech Intelligibility Without Sacrificing Environmental Sound Recognition

Download or read book Improving Speech Intelligibility Without Sacrificing Environmental Sound Recognition written by Eric M. Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three manuscripts presented here examine concepts related to speech perception in noise and ways to overcome poor speech intelligibility without depriving listeners of environmental sound recognition. Because of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners’ auditory deficits, there is a substantial need for speech-enhancement (noise reduction) technology. Recent advancements in deep learning have resulted in algorithms that significantly improve the intelligibility of speech in noise, but in order to be suitable for real-world applications such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, these algorithms must be causal, talker independent, corpus independent, and noise independent. Manuscript 1 involves human-subjects testing of a novel, time-domain-based algorithm that fulfills these fundamental requirements. Algorithm processing resulted in significant intelligibility improvements for both HI and normal-hearing (NH) listener groups in each signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and noise type tested. In Manuscript 2, the range of speech-to-background ratios (SBRs) over which NH and HI listeners can accurately perform both speech and environmental recognition was determined. Separate groups of NH listeners were tested in conditions of selective and divided attention. A single group of HI listeners was tested in the divided attention experiment. Psychometric functions were generated for each listener group and task type. It was found that both NH and HI listeners are capable of high speech intelligibility and high environmental sound recognition over a range of speech-to-background ratios. The range and location of optimal speech-to-background ratios differed across NH and HI listeners. The optimal speech-to-background ratio also depended on the type of environmental sound present. Conventional deep-learning algorithms for speech enhancement target maximum intelligibly by removing as much noise as possible while maintaining the essential characteristics of the target speech signal. Manuscript 3 tests a new form of time-frequency masking that is designed to leave a small amount of background noise intact. The purpose of the unremoved background noise is to allow for environmental sound awareness while still providing significantly increased intelligibility. It was found that this type of processing resulted in significantly improved intelligibility and high environmental sound recognition performance for both types of listeners. It was also found that the same level of maximum attenuation provided the optimal balance of intelligibility and environmental sound recognition for both listener types.

Book Speech Processing in the Auditory System

Download or read book Speech Processing in the Auditory System written by Steven Greenberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-05-09 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although speech is the primary behavioral medium by which humans communicate, its auditory basis is poorly understood, having profound implications on efforts to ameliorate the behavioral consequences of hearing impairment and on the development of robust algorithms for computer speech recognition. In this volume, the authors provide an up-to-date synthesis of recent research in the area of speech processing in the auditory system, bringing together a diverse range of scientists to present the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. Of particular concern is the ability to understand speech in uncertain, potentially adverse acoustic environments, currently the bane of both hearing aid and speech recognition technology. There is increasing evidence that the perceptual stability characteristic of speech understanding is due, at least in part, to elegant transformations of the acoustic signal performed by auditory mechanisms. As a comprehensive review of speech's auditory basis, this book will interest physiologists, anatomists, psychologists, phoneticians, computer scientists, biomedical and electrical engineers, and clinicians.

Book Speech and Audio Processing in Adverse Environments

Download or read book Speech and Audio Processing in Adverse Environments written by Eberhard Hänsler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Users of signal processing systems are never satis?ed with the system they currently use. They are constantly asking for higher quality, faster perf- mance, more comfort and lower prices. Researchers and developers should be appreciative for this attitude. It justi?es their constant e?ort for improved systems. Better knowledge about biological and physical interrelations c- ing along with more powerful technologies are their engines on the endless road to perfect systems. This book is an impressive image of this process. After “Acoustic Echo 1 and Noise Control” published in 2004 many new results lead to “Topics in 2 Acoustic Echo and Noise Control” edited in 2006 . Today – in 2008 – even morenew?ndingsandsystemscouldbecollectedinthisbook.Comparingthe contributions in both edited volumes progress in knowledge and technology becomesclearlyvisible:Blindmethodsandmultiinputsystemsreplace“h- ble” low complexity systems. The functionality of new systems is less and less limited by the processing power available under economic constraints. The editors have to thank all the authors for their contributions. They cooperated readily in our e?ort to unify the layout of the chapters, the ter- nology, and the symbols used. It was a pleasure to work with all of them. Furthermore, it is the editors concern to thank Christoph Baumann and the Springer Publishing Company for the encouragement and help in publi- ing this book.

Book Speech and Audio Processing for Coding  Enhancement and Recognition

Download or read book Speech and Audio Processing for Coding Enhancement and Recognition written by Tokunbo Ogunfunmi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the basic principles underlying the generation, coding, transmission and enhancement of speech and audio signals, including advanced statistical and machine learning techniques for speech and speaker recognition with an overview of the key innovations in these areas. Key research undertaken in speech coding, speech enhancement, speech recognition, emotion recognition and speaker diarization are also presented, along with recent advances and new paradigms in these areas.

Book Improving Speech Intelligibility in Fluctuating Background Interference

Download or read book Improving Speech Intelligibility in Fluctuating Background Interference written by Laura A. D'Aquila and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The masking release (MR; i.e., better speech recognition in fluctuating compared to continuous noise backgrounds) that is evident for normal-hearing (NH) listeners is generally reduced or absent in hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. In this study, a signal-processing technique was developed to improve MR in HI listeners and offer insight into the mechanisms influencing the size of MR. This technique compares short-term and long-term estimates of energy, increases the level of short-term segments whose energy is below the average energy, and normalizes the overall energy of the processed signal to be equivalent to that of the original long-term estimate. In consonant-identification tests, HI listeners achieved similar scores for processed and unprocessed stimuli in quiet and in continuous-noise backgrounds, while superior performance was obtained for the processed speech in some of the fluctuating background noises. Thus, the energy-normalized signals led to larger values of MR compared to that obtained with unprocessed signals.

Book Single Channel Phase Aware Signal Processing in Speech Communication

Download or read book Single Channel Phase Aware Signal Processing in Speech Communication written by Pejman Mowlaee and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview on the challenging new topic of phase-aware signal processing Speech communication technology is a key factor in human-machine interaction, digital hearing aids, mobile telephony, and automatic speech/speaker recognition. With the proliferation of these applications, there is a growing requirement for advanced methodologies that can push the limits of the conventional solutions relying on processing the signal magnitude spectrum. Single-Channel Phase-Aware Signal Processing in Speech Communication provides a comprehensive guide to phase signal processing and reviews the history of phase importance in the literature, basic problems in phase processing, fundamentals of phase estimation together with several applications to demonstrate the usefulness of phase processing. Key features: Analysis of recent advances demonstrating the positive impact of phase-based processing in pushing the limits of conventional methods. Offers unique coverage of the historical context, fundamentals of phase processing and provides several examples in speech communication. Provides a detailed review of many references and discusses the existing signal processing techniques required to deal with phase information in different applications involved with speech. The book supplies various examples and MATLAB® implementations delivered within the PhaseLab toolbox. Single-Channel Phase-Aware Signal Processing in Speech Communication is a valuable single-source for students, non-expert DSP engineers, academics and graduate students.

Book Beyond Amplification

Download or read book Beyond Amplification written by Laurel Ann Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Improving Speech Intelligibility in Adults

Download or read book Improving Speech Intelligibility in Adults written by Connie K. Porcaro and published by Plural Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being intelligible to a listener means getting your message across and improving speech intelligibility is one of the most common goals for clients working with a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Improving Speech Intelligibility in Adults: Clinical Application of Evidence-Based Strategies is a professional resource for practicing SLPs working with adults with communication disorders, such as dysarthria, acquired apraxia of speech, and voice disorders. This book incorporates current research findings to support the use of evidence-based strategies in clinical situations. While other books may focus on “drilling” and “practicing” a list of words, sentences, and topics to use with a client to change their behaviors, Improving Speech Intelligibility in Adults uniquely focuses on the speaker and the listener in tandem. The author takes a noteworthy approach in how the listener can change behaviors to assist with understanding. The text presents a comprehensive approach to improving speech intelligibility by including ways to enhance the communication environment during in-person or teletherapy exchanges to enhance understanding between speaker and listener.

Book Applied Speech and Audio Processing

Download or read book Applied Speech and Audio Processing written by Ian McLoughlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hands-on, one-stop resource describes the key techniques of speech and audio processing illustrated with extensive MATLAB examples.

Book Understanding Speech in Complex Acoustic Environments

Download or read book Understanding Speech in Complex Acoustic Environments written by Adam Westermann and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest challenges for the auditory system is communicating in environments where speech is degraded by multiple spatially distributed maskers and room reverberation. This "cocktail-party" situation and the related auditory mechanisms have been a topic for numerous studies. This thesis primarily investigated speech intelligibility in such environments - specifically considering the role of differences in distance between talkers and the contribution of informational masking (IM).