Incorporating frequency masking filtering in a standard MFCC feature extraction algorithm

In this paper, we propose a feature set by concatenating Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Spectral Centroid Magnitude Coefficients (SCMC) features for Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). MFCC features are used to hold the acoustic characteristics such as spectral envelope of an acoustic scene in each frame. It also carries the sub-band average energy as a single dimension. SCMC features are used to hold the distribution of energy in a sub-band effectively. A test is carried out on Tampere University of Technology (TUT) Acoustic Scenes 2017 Dataset. The DNN architecture for utterance level classification has been used. The proposed system’s performance on a 4-fold cross-validation setup is 80.2% and it gives 5.4% relative improvement in performance when compared to the baseline system that uses log-Mel band energies with Multi-Layer Perceptron model.

This paper describes a study of a set of features based on cepstral mean and variance normalization (CMVN) plus auto regressive moving average (ARMA) filtering technique which is called MVA and on histogram equalization (HEQ) for robust speech recognition. First, we use MVA then HEQ in combination with CMVN and ARMA filtering as a post-processing module to mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Relative Spectral-Perceptual linear prediction (RASTA-PLP) and power normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCC) features to improve the performance of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. The results on the Arabic database task have shown that both methods MVA and HEQ+ARMA improves the success rate for all features compared to the baseline system however HEQ was not found to perform better than MVA. The results also provide that RASTA-PLP outperforms PNCC and MFCC features.

Significance of analytic phase of speech signals in speaker verification

Human voice plays a very principle role in effective communication among human beings. Since, every human has an unique characteristics (features) of his voice, and speech processing is the field of engineering which performs various operations on speech & extract those characteristics. These characteristics or features are unique for specific person. Human ears are not able to identify such features at micro level. This paper presents approach to extract features from original and dubbing audio signals and analysis with the help frame segmentation analysis approach & Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) feature extraction algorithm.

In the field of medicine, with the introduction of computer systems that can collect and analyze massive amounts of data, many non-invasive diagnostic methods are being developed for a variety of conditions. In this study, our aim is to develop a non-invasive method of classifying respiratory sounds that are recorded by an electronic stethoscope and the audio recording software that uses various machine learning algorithms.In order to store respiratory sounds on a computer, we developed a cost-effective and easy-to-use electronic stethoscope that can be used with any device. Using this device, we recorded 17,930 lung sounds from 1630 subjects.We employed two types of machine learning algorithms; mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features in a support vector machine (SVM) and spectrogram images in the convolutional neural network (CNN). Since using MFCC features with a SVM algorithm is a generally accepted classification method for audio, we utilized its results to benchmark the CNN algorithm. We prepared four data sets for each CNN and SVM algorithm to classify respiratory audio: (1) healthy versus pathological classification; (2) rale, rhonchus, and normal sound classification; (3) singular respiratory sound type classification; and (4) audio type classification with all sound types. Accuracy results of the experiments were; (1) CNN 86%, SVM 86%, (2) CNN 76%, SVM 75%, (3) CNN 80%, SVM 80%, and (4) CNN 62%, SVM 62%, respectively.As a result, we found out that spectrogram image classification with CNN algorithm works as well as the SVM algorithm, and given the large amount of data, CNN and SVM machine learning algorithms can accurately classify and pre-diagnose respiratory audio.

This work investigates the significance of the voiced and unvoiced region for detecting common cold from the speech signal. In literature, the entire speech signal is processed to detect the common cold and other diseases. This study uses a short-time energy-based approach to segment the voiced and unvoiced region of the speech signal. Then, frame-wise mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features are extracted from the voiced and unvoiced segments of each speech utterance, and statistics (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) are calculated to get the feature vector for each speech utterance. The support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to analyze the performance of features extracted from the voiced and unvoiced region. Result shows that the feature extracted from voiced segments, unvoiced segments, and complete active speech (CAS) gives almost similar results using the MFCC features and SVM classifier. Therefore, rather than processing the CAS, we can process the unvoiced speech segments, which have fewer frames compared to CAS and voiced regions of speech. The processing of solely unvoiced segments can reduce the time and computation complexity of a speech signal-based common cold detection system.

Acoustic bird species classification under low SNR and small-scale dataset conditions

This paper presents the automatic genre classification of Indian Tamil music and western music using timbral features and fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) based Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features. The classifier model for the proposed system has been built using K-nearest neighbours and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. In this work, the performance of various features extracted from music excerpts have been analyzed, to identify the appropriate feature descriptors for the two major genres of Indian Tamil music, namely classical music (Carnatic based devotional hymn compositions) and folk music. The results have shown that the feature combination of spectral roll off, spectral flux, spectral skewness and spectral kurtosis, combined with fractional MFCC features, outperforms all other feature combinations, to yield a higher classification accuracy of 96.05 %, as compared to the accuracy of 84.21 % with conventional MFCC. It has also been observed, that the FrFT based MFCC, with timbral features and SVM, efficiently classifies the two western genres of rock and classical music, from the GTZAN dataset, with fewer features and a higher classification accuracy of 96.25 %, as compared to the classification accuracy of 80 % with conventional MFCC.

The Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature can be cast-off in speaker recognition. The process of feature extraction of the speech signal using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature vectors will generate an acoustic speech signal. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is frequently used as a classifier for Big Data related problems. In this research, we proposed a new model based on MFCC and LSH to integrate into speaker recognition model. The main returns of our newly proposed model are to get robustness, effective and accurate results in comparison with MFCC+GMM, LPCC+GMM and MFCC+PNN models. This model also contributes to the literature of Big Data. In this model, first, we extract the MFCC features from the wave file then we applied LSH classifier on extracted feature to transform into hash-table. Finally, the hash-tables of train and test wave files are compared and obtained 92.66% speaker recognition accuracy. We compared the accuracy ratio of proposed model with other traditional models namely MFCC+GMM, MFCC+PNN, and LPCC+GMM. Experimental results show that proposed model is more accurate and robust than traditional models and good for speaker recognition.

The Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature extraction method is a leading approach for speech feature extraction and current research aims to identify performance enhancements. One of the recent MFCC implementations is the Delta-Delta MFCC, which improves speaker verification. In this paper, a new MFCC feature extraction method based on distributed Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT-II) is presented. Speaker verification tests are proposed based on three different feature extraction methods including: conventional MFCC, Delta-Delta MFCC and distributed DCT-II based Delta-Delta MFCC with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) classifier.

Speaker identification refers to the process of recognizing human voice using artificial intelligence techniques. Speaker identification technologies are widely applied in voice authentication, security and surveillance, electronic voice eavesdropping, and identity verification. In the speaker identification process, extracting discriminative and salient features from speaker utterances is an important task to accurately identify speakers. Various features for speaker identification have been recently proposed by researchers. Most studies on speaker identification have utilized short-time features, such as perceptual linear predictive (PLP) coefficients and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), due to their capability to capture the repetitive nature and efficiency of signals. Various studies have shown the effectiveness of MFCC features in correctly identifying speakers. However, the performances of these features degrade on complex speech datasets, and therefore, these features fail to accurately identify speaker characteristics. To address this problem, this study proposes a novel fusion of MFCC and time-based features (MFCCT), which combines the effectiveness of MFCC and time-domain features to improve the accuracy of text-independent speaker identification (SI) systems. The extracted MFCCT features were fed as input to a deep neural network (DNN) to construct the speaker identification model. Results showed that the proposed MFCCT features coupled with DNN outperformed existing baseline MFCC and time-domain features on the LibriSpeech dataset. In addition, DNN obtained better classification results compared with five machine learning algorithms that were recently utilized in speaker recognition. Moreover, this study evaluated the effectiveness of one-level and two-level classification methods for speaker identification. The experimental results showed that two-level classification presented better results than one-level classification. The proposed features and classification model for identifying a speaker can be widely applied to different types of speaker datasets.

This paper addresses the realization of a Human/Machine (H/M) interface including a system for automatic recognition of the Continuous Pathological Speech (ARSCPS) and several communication tools in order to help frail people with speech problems (Dysarthric speech) to access services providing by new technologies of information and communication (TIC) while making it easier for the doctors to achieve a first diagnosis on the patient’s disease. In addition, an ARSCPS has been improved and developed for normal and pathology voice while establishing a link with our graphic interface which is based on the box tools Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK), in addition to the Hidden Models of Markov (HMM). In our work we used different techniques of feature extraction for the speech recognition system in order to improve the dysarthric speech intelligibility while developing an ARSCPS which can perform well for pathological and normal speakers. These techniques are based on the coefficients of ETSI standard Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient Front End (ETSI MFCC FE V2.0); Perceptual Linear Prediction coefficients (PLP); Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and the recently proposed Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) have been used as a basis for comparison. In this context we used the Nemours database which contains 11 speakers that represents dysarthric speech and 11 speakers that represents normal speech.

This paper presents a Bangla (widely used as Bengali) automatic speech recognition system (ASR) by suppressing gender effects. Gender characteristic plays an important role on the performance of ASR. If there is a suppression process that represses the decrease of differences in acoustic-likelihood among categories resulted from gender factors, a robust ASR system can be realized. In the proposed method, we have designed a new ASR incorporating the Local Features (LFs) instead of standard mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) as an acoustic feature for Bangla by suppressing the gender effects, which embeds three HMM-based classifiers for corresponding male, female and geneder-independent (GI) characteristics. In the experiments on Bangla speech database prepared by us, the proposed system has achieved a significant improvement of word correct rates (WCRs), word accuracies (WAs) and sentence correct rates (SCRs) in comparison with the method that incorporates Standard MFCCs.

Speech production knowledge has been used to enhance the phonetic representation and the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems successfully. Representations of speech production make simple explanations for many phenomena observed in speech. These phenomena can not be easily analyzed from either acoustic signal or phonetic transcription alone. One of the most important aspects of speech production knowledge is the use of articulatory knowledge, which describes the smooth and continuous movements in the vocal tract. In this paper, we present a new articulatory model to provide available information for rescoring the speech recognition lattice hypothesis. The articulatory model consists of a feature front-end, which computes a voicing feature based on a spectral harmonics correlation (SHC) function, and a back-end based on the combination of deep neural networks (DNNs) and hidden Markov models (HMMs). The voicing features are incorporated with standard Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) using heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA) to compensate the speech recognition accuracy rates. Moreover, the advantages of two different models are taken into account by the algorithm, which retains deep learning properties of DNNs, while modeling the articulatory context powerfully through HMMs. Mandarin speech recognition experiments show the proposed method achieves significant improvements in speech recognition performance over the system using MFCCs alone.

This paper investigates robust privacy-sensitive audio features for speaker diarization in multiparty conversations: i.e., a set of audio features having low linguistic information for speaker diarization in a single and multiple distant microphone scenarios. We systematically investigate Linear Prediction (LP) residual. Issues such as prediction order and choice of representation of LP residual are studied. Additionally, we explore the combination of LP residual with subband information from 2.5 kHz to 3.5 kHz and spectral slope. Next, we propose a supervised framework using deep neural architecture for deriving privacy-sensitive audio features. We benchmark these approaches against the traditional Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features for speaker diarization in both the microphone scenarios. Experiments on the RT07 evaluation dataset show that the proposed approaches yield diarization performance close to the MFCC features on the single distant microphone dataset. To objectively evaluate the notion of privacy in terms of linguistic information, we perform human and automatic speech recognition tests, showing that the proposed approaches to privacy-sensitive audio features yield much lower recognition accuracies compared to MFCC features.