Recent development in telecommunication services, such as VoIP in NGN and car communications has become increasingly necessary for use of hands-free communication system using separate microphones and loudspeakers. Hands-free system has been largely affected by noisy circumstances. This paper describes experimental results and perspectives for subjective and objective quality assessment of nois...

This study investigates a multistream phone recognition system, which consists of 21 parrallel sub-systems, each covers two critical bands, and fused by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) system. Within each band, speech information is encoded by the frequency-domain linear prediction (FDLP) feature, which characterizes the temporal modulation of subband envelope. Two experiments are conducted to d...

The traditional approaches for formant frequency estimation are misled by spectral peaks in unvoiced speech and perform very poorly in transient background noise. Also, these traditional algorithms are not robust in real life noise environment and are unable to recover quickly after periods of silence. Robust formant tracking algorithm is discussed. Testing of the algorithm using various speech...

Previous use of gaze (eye movement) to improve ASR performance involves shifting language model probability mass towards the subset of the vocabulary whose words are related to a person’s visual attention. Motivated to improve Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance in acoustically noisy settings by using information from gaze selectively, we propose a ‘Selective Gaze-contingent ASR’ (SG...

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...

Speech intelligibility in a multitalker background can be affected by the language of both the talker and the interfering speech. This study investigated whether this interaction is modulated by dialect variations of the same language. American English listeners were presented with target sentences in either their own General American English (GAE) or a different accent (Southern American Engli...

An auditory feature extraction algorithm for robust speech recognition in adverse acoustic environments is presented. The feature computation is comprised of an outer-middle-ear transfer function, FFT, frequency conversion from linear to the Bark scale, auditory filtering, nonlinearity, and discrete cosine transform. The feature is evaluated in two tasks: connected-digit recognition and large v...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES People usually converse in real-life background noise. They experience more difficulty understanding speech in noise than in a quiet environment. The present study investigated how speech recognition in real-life background noise is affected by the type of noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and age. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Eighteen young adults and fifteen middle-aged ...

Published studies assessing the association between cognitive performance and speech-in-noise (SiN) perception examine different aspects of each, test different listeners, and often report quite variable associations. By examining the published evidence base using a systematic approach, we aim to identify robust patterns across studies and highlight any remaining gaps in knowledge. We limit our...

BACKGROUND Listening in challenging situations requires explicit cognitive resources to decode and process speech. Traditional speech recognition tests are limited in documenting this cognitive effort, which may differ greatly between individuals or listening conditions despite similar scores. A sequential sentence paradigm was designed to be more sensitive to individual differences in demands ...