Adaptive voice activity detection for wireless communications based on hybrid fuzzy learning

This paper proposes two algorithms for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) based on sparse representation in spectro-temporal domain. The first algorithm was made using two-dimensional STRF (Spectro-Temporal Response Field) space based on sparse representation. Dictionaries with different atomic sizes and two dictionary learning methods were investigated in this approach. This algorithm revealed good results at high SNRs (signal-to-noise ratio). The second algorithm, whose approach is more complicated, suggests a speech detector using the sparse representation in four-dimensional STRF space. Due to the large volume of STRF's four-dimensional space, this space was divided into cubes, with dictionaries made for each cube separately by NMF (non-negative matrix factorization) learning algorithm. Simulation results were presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our new VAD algorithms. The results revealed that the achieved performance was 90.11% and 91.75% under -5 dB SNR in white and car noise respectively, outperforming most of the state-of-the-art VAD algorithms.

A robust algorithm for voice activity detection (VAD) is presented. It defines a likelihood ratio test (LRT) involving multiple and independent observations of the bispectra. The proposed VAD provides significant improvements in speech/pause discrimination when compared to standardised and recently reported VADs.

Analysis of derivative of instantaneous frequency and its application to voice activity detection

To obtain reliable performance of Voice Activity Detector (VAD) algorithm, the straight lines on spectrogram of speech-activity being robust against noise is characterized by an entropy-based measure in this paper. A measure of entropy will be defined on the energy domain of harmonic subband. It is shown that the entropy-based measure is well suited for detecting speech in white or quasi-white noises, but will perform poorly for coloured noises. To compensate the limitation, the refined minima controlled recursive averaging, which be updated quickly and accurately even given rapidly increasing levels of noise, is required to desensitize the measure of entropy to various types of noise. Consequently, the proposed VAD algorithm is shown significantly outperform the commonly used energy-based algorithm when SNR drops rapidly, and moreover is insensitive to the changing-level of noise. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed VAD is comparable to modern standard VADs such that ITU-T G.729B and ETSI front-end VAD or statistical model-based VADs.

In this paper, voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms and the development are introduced firstly, and then the analysis and comparison of the dominating VAD algorithms are proposed. Finally, the development characteristics of VAD are summarized. The simulation result shows that VAD of double threshold method is efficient on-line.

A problem has been identified with the handling of information tones by the full-rate GSM voice activity detector (VAD). The paper describes the modifications made in the half-rate GSM VAD which significantly improve the transmission of information tones, thus enabling the implementation of discontinuous transmission (DTX) in the GSM down-link. The modification consists of the addition of a tone detection algorithm to the basic full-rate GSM VAD architecture. The underlying assumptions behind the tone detector are discussed and the potential performance limitations identified. The half-rate GSM VAD successfully detects almost all tones that are likely to be encountered in networks across the world.

Existing acoustic-signal-based algorithms for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) do not perform well in the presence of noise. In this study, we propose a method to improve VAD accuracy by employing another type of signal representation which is derived from the response of the human Auditory-Nerve (AN) system. The neural responses referred to as a neurogram are simulated using a computational model of the AN system for a range of Characteristic Frequencies (CFs). Features are extracted from neurograms using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and are then trained using a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifier to predict the VAD intervals. The proposed method was evaluated using the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT corpus, and the NIST scoring algorithm for VAD was employed as an accuracy measure. The proposed neural-response-based method exhibited an overall better VAD accuracy over most of the existing methods.

A new voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm with soft decision output in Mel-frequency domain is developed based on hidden Markov model (HMM) and is incorporated in an HMM-based speech enhancement system. The proposed VAD uses a two-state ergodic HMM representing speech presence and speech absence. The states are constructed from noisy speech and noise HMMs used in the speech enhancement system. This composite model provides a robust detection of speech segments in the presence of noise and obviates the need for extra modeling in HMM-based speech enhancement applications. As the main purpose of the proposed VAD is to detect speech segments accurately, a hang-over mechanism is proposed and is applied on the output of the VAD to improve the speech detection rate. The VAD is integrated in the HMM-based speech enhancement system in Mel-frequency spectral (MFS) and cepstral (MFC) domains. The performance of the proposed VAD, the effectiveness of the hang-over mechanism and the performance of the VAD-integrated speech enhancement system are evaluated on four noise types at different SNR levels. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed VAD compared to the reference methods particularly for speech detection rate at the dominant noisy conditions.

An effective voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm is proposed for improving speech recognition performance in noisy environments. The proposed speech/pause discrimination method is based on a hard-decision clustering approach built over a set of subband log-energies. Detecting the presence of speech frames (a new cluster) is achieved using a basic sequential algorithm scheme (BSAS) according to a given “distance” (in this case, geometrical distance) and a suitable threshold. The accuracy of the Cl-VAD algorithm lies in the use of a decision function defined over a multiple-observation (MO) window of averaged subband log-energies and the modeling of noise subspace into cluster prototypes. In addition, time efficiency is also reached due to the clustering approach which is fundamental in VAD real time applications, i.e. speech recognition. An exhaustive analysis on the Spanish SpeechDat-Car databases is conducted in order to assess the performance of the proposed method and to compare it to existing standard VAD methods. The results show improvements in detection accuracy over standard VADs and a representative set of recently reported VAD algorithms.

We introduce an efficient hidden Markov model-based voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm with time-variant state-transition probabilities in the underlying Markov chain. The transition probabilities vary in an exponential charge/discharge scheme and are softly merged with state conditional likelihood into a final VAD decision. Working in the domain of ITU-T G.729 parameters, with no additional cost for feature extraction, the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms G.729 Annex B VAD while providing a balanced tradeoff between clipping and false detection errors. The performance compares very favorably with the adaptive multi-rate VAD, option 2 (AMR2).

In this paper the quick and efficient definition of hangbefore and hangover criteria for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) algorithm is presented. Hangbefore and hangover criteria are integrated into VAD algorithm after basic VAD decision step. Using the hangbefore criterion, the problem of incorrect detection of unvoiced speech that occurs at the beginning and in the middle of the speech segment, can be solved. Using the hangover criterion, the problem of incorrect detection of unvoiced speech that occurs at the end and in the middle of the speech segment, can be improved. There is always a dilemma of how many frames should be taken for hangover and hangbefore criteria. The main purpose of this study was to set up the procedure, which would quickly and reliably define frames for hangbefore and hangover criteria. Our test results showed that the new quick procedure has led us to very similar final results as obtained with the previously known procedures.

An important drawback affecting most of the speech processing systems is the environmental noise and its harmful effect on the system performance. Examples of such systems are the new wireless communications voice services or digital hearing aid devices. In speech recognition, there are still technical barriers inhibiting such systems from meeting the demands of modern applications. Numerous noise reduction techniques have been developed to palliate the effect of the noise on the system performance and often require an estimate of the noise statistics obtained by means of a precise voice activity detector (VAD). Speech/non-speech detection is an unsolved problem in speech processing and affects numerous applications including robust speech recognition (Karray and Marting, 2003; Ramirez et al. 2003), discontinuous transmission (ITU, 1996; ETSI, 1999), real-time speech transmission on the Internet (Sangwan et al., 2002) or combined noise reduction and echo cancellation schemes in the context of telephony (Basbug et al., 2004; Gustafsson et al., 2002). The speech/non-speech classification task is not as trivial as it appears, and most of the VAD algorithms fail when the level of background noise increases. During the last decade, numerous researchers have developed different strategies for detecting speech on a noisy signal (Sohn et al., 1999; Cho and Kondoz, 2001; Gazor and Zhang, 2003, Armani et al., 2003) and have evaluated the influence of the VAD effectiveness on the performance of speech processing systems (Bouquin-Jeannes and Faucon, 1995). Most of the approaches have focussed on the development of robust algorithms with special attention being paid to the derivation and study of noise robust features and decision rules (Woo et al., 2000; Li et al., 2002; Marzinzik and Kollmeier, 2002). The different VAD methods include those based on energy thresholds (Woo et al., 2000), pitch detection (Chengalvarayan, 1999), spectrum analysis (Marzinzik and Kollmeier, 2002), zero-crossing rate (ITU, 1996), periodicity measure (Tucker, 1992), higher order statistics in the LPC residual domain (Nemer et al., 2001) or combinations of different features (ITU, 1993; ETSI, 1999; Tanyer and Ozer, 2000). This chapter shows a comprehensive approximation to the main challenges in voice activity detection, the different solutions that have been reported in a complete review of the state of the art and the evaluation frameworks that are normally used. The application of VADs for speech coding, speech enhancement and robust speech recognition systems is shown and discussed. Three different VAD methods are described and compared to standardized and

This paper describes the VAD (voice activity detection) for controlling DTX (discontinuous transmission) of the GSM AMR (adaptive multi-rate) speech codec. The algorithm is based on spectral estimation and periodicity detection. The VAD contains a 9-band IIR filter bank, which divides input signals into frequency bands. The signal level at each band is calculated. Background noise is estimated in each sub-band. The VAD decision is computed by comparing input signal level and background noise estimate. The algorithm incorporates novel methods to estimate background noise and to detect periodic components based on open-loop pitch gain. A new method is also derived to detect correlated complex signals like music.

Speech can be modeled as short bursts of vocal energy separated by silence gaps. During typical conversation talk-spurts comprise only 31.5% of each party's speech and the remaining 68.5% is silence. Communication systems can achieve significant gains in spectral efficiency and energy efficiency by disconnecting the users from the spectral resource during the silence periods. This paper develops a simple, efficient, and robust voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm to work in a mobile or portable environment exhibiting dynamically varying background noise. The VAD uses probabilistic distances based on the energy content, the periodicity, the stationarity and the spectral distribution within the low frequency band to decide if the presented speech frame is speech or silence.

In this paper, we address the problem of multiple view data fusion in the presence of noise and interferences. Recent studies have approached this problem using kernel methods, by relying particularly on a product of kernels constructed separately for each view. From a graph theory point of view, we analyze this fusion approach in a discrete setting. More specifically, based on a statistical model for the connectivity between data points, we propose an algorithm for the selection of the kernel bandwidth, a parameter that, as we show, has important implications on the robustness of this fusion approach to interferences. Then, we consider the fusion of audio-visual speech signals measured by a single microphone and by a video camera pointed to the face of the speaker. Specifically, we address the task of voice activity detection, i.e., the detection of speech and nonspeech segments, in the presence of structured interferences such as keyboard taps and office noise. We propose an algorithm for voice activity detection based on the audio-visual signal. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms competing fusion and voice activity detection approaches. In addition, we demonstrate that a proper selection of the kernel bandwidth indeed leads to improved performance.