Constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Vocabulary Acquisition from Continuous Speech

One desideratum in designing cognitive robots is autonomous learning of communication skills, just like humans. The primary step towards this goal is vocabulary acquisition. Being different from the training procedures of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, vocabulary acquisition cannot rely on prior knowledge of language in the same way. Like what infants do, the acquisition process should be data-driven with multi-level abstraction and coupled with multi-modal inputs. To avoid lengthy training efforts in a word-by-word interactive learning process, a clever learning agent should be able to acquire vocabularies from continuous speech automatically. The work presented in this thesis is entitled \emph{Constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Vocabulary Acquisition from Continuous Speech}. Enlightened by the extensively studied techniques in ASR, we design computational models to discover and represent vocabularies from continuous speech with little prior knowledge of the language to ...

Sun, Meng — Katholieke Universiteit Leuven


Speech Enhancement Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and Hidden Markov Models

Reducing interference noise in a noisy speech recording has been a challenging task for many years yet has a variety of applications, for example, in handsfree mobile communications, in speech recognition, and in hearing aids. Traditional single-channel noise reduction schemes, such as Wiener filtering, do not work satisfactorily in the presence of non-stationary background noise. Alternatively, supervised approaches, where the noise type is known in advance, lead to higher-quality enhanced speech signals. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised single-channel noise reduction algorithms. We consider two classes of methods for this purpose: approaches based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and methods based on hidden Markov models (HMM). The contributions of this dissertation can be divided into three main (overlapping) parts. First, we propose NMF-based enhancement approaches that use temporal dependencies of the speech signals. In a standard NMF, the important temporal ...

Mohammadiha, Nasser — KTH Royal Institute of Technology


Nonnegative Matrix and Tensor Factorizations: Models, Algorithms and Applications

In many fields, such as linear algebra, computational geometry, combinatorial optimization, analytical chemistry and geoscience, nonnegativity of the solution is required, which is either due to the fact that the data is physically nonnegative, or that the mathematical modeling of the problem requires nonnegativity. Image and audio processing are two examples for which the data are physically nonnegative. Probability and graph theory are examples for which the mathematical modeling requires nonnegativity. This thesis is about the nonnegative factorization of matrices and tensors: namely nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF). NMF problems arise in a wide range of scenarios such as the aforementioned fields, and NTF problems arise as a generalization of NMF. As the title suggests, the contributions of this thesis are centered on NMF and NTF over three aspects: modeling, algorithms and applications. On the modeling ...

Ang, Man Shun — Université de Mons


Unsupervised and semi-supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization methods for brain tumor segmentation using multi-parametric MRI data

Gliomas represent about 80% of all malignant primary brain tumors. Despite recent advancements in glioma research, patient outcome remains poor. The 5 year survival rate of the most common and most malignant subtype, i.e. glioblastoma, is about 5%. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become the imaging modality of choice in the management of brain tumor patients. Conventional MRI (cMRI) provides excellent soft tissue contrast without exposing the patient to potentially harmful ionizing radiation. Over the past decade, advanced MRI modalities, such as perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) have gained interest in the clinical field, and their added value regarding brain tumor diagnosis, treatment planning and follow-up has been recognized. Tumor segmentation involves the imaging-based delineation of a tumor and its subcompartments. In gliomas, segmentation plays an important role in treatment planning as well ...

Sauwen, Nicolas — KU Leuven


Deep Learning for Distant Speech Recognition

Deep learning is an emerging technology that is considered one of the most promising directions for reaching higher levels of artificial intelligence. Among the other achievements, building computers that understand speech represents a crucial leap towards intelligent machines. Despite the great efforts of the past decades, however, a natural and robust human-machine speech interaction still appears to be out of reach, especially when users interact with a distant microphone in noisy and reverberant environments. The latter disturbances severely hamper the intelligibility of a speech signal, making Distant Speech Recognition (DSR) one of the major open challenges in the field. This thesis addresses the latter scenario and proposes some novel techniques, architectures, and algorithms to improve the robustness of distant-talking acoustic models. We first elaborate on methodologies for realistic data contamination, with a particular emphasis on DNN training with simulated data. ...

Ravanelli, Mirco — Fondazione Bruno Kessler


Robust Speech Recognition on Intelligent Mobile Devices with Dual-Microphone

Despite the outstanding progress made on automatic speech recognition (ASR) throughout the last decades, noise-robust ASR still poses a challenge. Tackling with acoustic noise in ASR systems is more important than ever before for a twofold reason: 1) ASR technology has begun to be extensively integrated in intelligent mobile devices (IMDs) such as smartphones to easily accomplish different tasks (e.g. search-by-voice), and 2) IMDs can be used anywhere at any time, that is, under many different acoustic (noisy) conditions. On the other hand, with the aim of enhancing noisy speech, IMDs have begun to embed small microphone arrays, i.e. microphone arrays comprised of a few sensors close each other. These multi-sensor IMDs often embed one microphone (usually at their rear) intended to capture the acoustic environment more than the speaker’s voice. This is the so-called secondary microphone. While classical microphone ...

López-Espejo, Iván — University of Granada


Non-linear Spatial Filtering for Multi-channel Speech Enhancement

A large part of human speech communication takes place in noisy environments and is supported by technical devices. For example, a hearing-impaired person might use a hearing aid to take part in a conversation in a busy restaurant. These devices, but also telecommunication in noisy environments or voiced-controlled assistants, make use of speech enhancement and separation algorithms that improve the quality and intelligibility of speech by separating speakers and suppressing background noise as well as other unwanted effects such as reverberation. If the devices are equipped with more than one microphone, which is very common nowadays, then multi-channel speech enhancement approaches can leverage spatial information in addition to single-channel tempo-spectral information to perform the task. Traditionally, linear spatial filters, so-called beamformers, have been employed to suppress the signal components from other than the target direction and thereby enhance the desired ...

Tesch, Kristina — Universität Hamburg


Representation and Metric Learning Advances for Deep Neural Network Face and Speaker Biometric Systems

The increasing use of technological devices and biometric recognition systems in people daily lives has motivated a great deal of research interest in the development of effective and robust systems. However, there are still some challenges to be solved in these systems when Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are employed. For this reason, this thesis proposes different approaches to address these issues. First of all, we have analyzed the effect of introducing the most widespread DNN architectures to develop systems for face and text-dependent speaker verification tasks. In this analysis, we observed that state-of-the-art DNNs established for many tasks, including face verification, did not perform efficiently for text-dependent speaker verification. Therefore, we have conducted a study to find the cause of this poor performance and we have noted that under certain circumstances this problem is due to the use of a ...

Mingote, Victoria — University of Zaragoza


Sound Event Detection by Exploring Audio Sequence Modelling

Everyday sounds in real-world environments are a powerful source of information by which humans can interact with their environments. Humans can infer what is happening around them by listening to everyday sounds. At the same time, it is a challenging task for a computer algorithm in a smart device to automatically recognise, understand, and interpret everyday sounds. Sound event detection (SED) is the process of transcribing an audio recording into sound event tags with onset and offset time values. This involves classification and segmentation of sound events in the given audio recording. SED has numerous applications in everyday life which include security and surveillance, automation, healthcare monitoring, multimedia information retrieval, and assisted living technologies. SED is to everyday sounds what automatic speech recognition (ASR) is to speech and automatic music transcription (AMT) is to music. The fundamental questions in designing ...

[Pankajakshan], [Arjun] — Queen Mary University of London


Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Prediction

The ability to communicate through speech is important for social interaction. We rely on the ability to communicate with each other even in noisy conditions. Ideally, the speech is easy to understand but this is not always the case, if the speech is degraded, e.g., due to background noise, distortion or hearing impairment. One of the most important factors to consider in relation to such degradations is speech intelligibility, which is a measure of how easy or difficult it is to understand the speech. In this thesis, the focus is on the topic of speech intelligibility prediction. The thesis consists of an introduction to the field of speech intelligibility prediction and a collection of scientific papers. The introduction provides a background to the challenges with speech communication in noisy conditions, followed by an introduction to how speech is produced and ...

Sørensen, Charlotte — Aalborg University


Robust Direction-of-Arrival estimation and spatial filtering in noisy and reverberant environments

The advent of multi-microphone setups on a plethora of commercial devices in recent years has generated a newfound interest in the development of robust microphone array signal processing methods. These methods are generally used to either estimate parameters associated with acoustic scene or to extract signal(s) of interest. In most practical scenarios, the sources are located in the far-field of a microphone array where the main spatial information of interest is the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the plane waves originating from the source positions. The focus of this thesis is to incorporate robustness against either lack of or imperfect/erroneous information regarding the DOAs of the sound sources within a microphone array signal processing framework. The DOAs of sound sources is by itself important information, however, it is most often used as a parameter for a subsequent processing method. One of the ...

Chakrabarty, Soumitro — Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg


Automatic Analysis of Head and Facial Gestures in Video Streams

Automatic analysis of head gestures and facial expressions is a challenging research area and it has significant applications for intelligent human-computer interfaces. An important task is the automatic classification of non-verbal messages composed of facial signals where both facial expressions and head rotations are observed. This is a challenging task, because there is no definite grammar or code-book for mapping the non-verbal facial signals into a corresponding mental state. Furthermore, non-verbal facial signals and the observed emotions have dependency on personality, society, state of the mood and also the context in which they are displayed or observed. This thesis mainly addresses the three desired tasks for an effective visual information based automatic face and head gesture (FHG) analyzer. First we develop a fully automatic, robust and accurate 17-point facial landmark localizer based on local appearance information and structural information of ...

Cinar Akakin, Hatice — Bogazici University


Novel texture synthesis methods and their application to image prediction and image inpainting

This thesis presents novel exemplar-based texture synthesis methods for image prediction (i.e., predictive coding) and image inpainting problems. The main contributions of this study can also be seen as extensions to simple template matching, however the texture synthesis problem here is well-formulated in an optimization framework with different constraints. The image prediction problem has first been put into sparse representations framework by approximating the template with a sparsity constraint. The proposed sparse prediction method with locally and adaptive dictionaries has been shown to give better performance when compared to static waveform (such as DCT) dictionaries, and also to the template matching method. The image prediction problem has later been placed into an online dictionary learning framework by adapting conventional dictionary learning approaches for image prediction. The experimental observations show a better performance when compared to H.264/AVC intra and sparse prediction. ...

Turkan, Mehmet — INRIA-Rennes, France


Prediction and Optimization of Speech Intelligibility in Adverse Conditions

In digital speech-communication systems like mobile phones, public address systems and hearing aids, conveying the message is one of the most important goals. This can be challenging since the intelligibility of the speech may be harmed at various stages before, during and after the transmission process from sender to receiver. Causes which create such adverse conditions include background noise, an unreliable internet connection during a Skype conversation or a hearing impairment of the receiver. To overcome this, many speech-communication systems include speech processing algorithms to compensate for these signal degradations like noise reduction. To determine the effect on speech intelligibility of these signal processing based solutions, the speech signal has to be evaluated by means of a listening test with human listeners. However, such tests are costly and time consuming. As an alternative, reliable and fast machine-driven intelligibility predictors are ...

Taal, Cees — Delft University of Technology


Robust Speech Recognition: Analysis and Equalization of Lombard Effect in Czech Corpora

When exposed to noise, speakers will modify the way they speak in an effort to maintain intelligible communication. This process, which is referred to as Lombard effect (LE), involves a combination of both conscious and subconscious articulatory adjustment. Speech production variations due to LE can cause considerable degradation in automatic speech recognition (ASR) since they introduce a mismatch between parameters of the speech to be recognized and the ASR system’s acoustic models, which are usually trained on neutral speech. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the impact of LE on speech production and to propose methods that increase ASR system performance in LE. All presented experiments were conducted on the Czech spoken language, yet, the proposed concepts are assumed applicable to other languages. The first part of the thesis focuses on the design and acquisition of a ...

Boril, Hynek — Czech Technical University in Prague

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