• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.26-30
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• 2019

This paper proposes a new voice activity detection (VAD) method which is based on SNR and non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation. In the conventional SNR-based VAD methods, voice activity probability is obtained by estimating frame-wise SNR at each spectral component. However these methods lack performance in various noisy environments. We devise a hybrid VAD method that uses non-intrusive speech intelligibility estimation as well as SNR estimation, where the speech intelligibility score is estimated based on deep neural network. In order to train model parameters of deep neural network, we use MFCC vector and the intrusive speech intelligibility score, STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligent Measure), as input and output, respectively. We developed speech presence measure to classify each noisy frame as voice or non-voice by calculating the weighted average of the estimated STOI value and the conventional SNR-based VAD value at each frame. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional VAD method in various noisy environments, especially when the SNR is very low.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.447-453
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• 2009

This paper introduces the method for detect voices and exact end point at low SNR by maximizing voice energy. Conventional VAD (Voice Activity Detection) algorithm estimates noise level so it tends to detect the end point inaccurately. Moreover, because it uses relatively long analysis range for reflecting temporal change of noise, computing load too high for application. In this paper, the SEM-VAD (Speech Energy Maximization-Voice Activity Detection) method which uses psycho-acoustical bark scale filter banks to maximize voice energy within frames is introduced. Stable threshold values are obtained at various noise environments (SNR 15 dB, 10 dB, 5 dB, 0 dB). At the test for voice detection in car noisy environment, PHR (Pause Hit Rate) was 100%accurate at every noise environment, and FAR (False Alarm Rate) shows 0% at SNR15 dB and 10 dB, 5.6% at SNR5 dB and 9.5% at SNR0 dB.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.310-315
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• 2015

A single channel VAD (Voice Activity Detection) algorithm for nonstationary noise environment is proposed in this paper. Threshold values of the feature parameter for VAD decision are updated adaptively based on estimates of means and standard deviations of past non-speech frames. The feature parameter, SPD-TE (Spectral Power Difference-Teager Energy), is obtained by applying the Teager energy to the WPD (Wavelet Packet Decomposition) coefficients. It was reported previously that the SPD-TE is robust to noise as a feature for VAD. Experimental results by using TIMIT speech and NOISEX-92 noise databases show that decision accuracy of the proposed algorithm is comparable to several typical VAD algorithms including standards for SNR values ranging from 10 to -10 dB.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.141-148
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• 2010

In this paper, voice activity detection (VAD) for dual-channel noisy speech recognition is proposed in which spatial cues are employed. In the proposed method, a probability model for speech presence/absence is constructed using spatial cues obtained from dual-channel input signal, and a speech activity interval is detected through this probability model. In particular, spatial cues are composed of interaural time differences and interaural level differences of dual-channel speech signals, and the probability model for speech presence/absence is based on a Gaussian kernel density. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed VAD method, speech recognition is performed for speech segments that only include speech intervals detected by the proposed VAD method. The performance of the proposed method is compared with those of several methods such as an SNR-based method, a direction of arrival (DOA) based method, and a phase vector based method. It is shown from the speech recognition experiments that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods by providing relative word error rates reductions of 11.68%, 41.92%, and 10.15% compared with SNR-based, DOA-based, and phase vector based method, respectively.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.16-24
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• 2007

Voice activity detectors (VADs) are important in wireless communication and speech signal processing. In the conventional VAD methods. an expression for the likelihood ratio test (LRT) based on statistical models is derived. Then, speech or noise is decided by comparing the value of the expression with a threshold. We propose a new method with the modified decision rule based on the Gaussian distribution and the uniformly most power (UMP) test. This method requires the distribution of the absolute value of the incoming speech signal. Then we can obtain the final decision through the relation between the Rayleigh distributions. This VAD method can detect speech without a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which is required in the conventional VAD algorithms. Additionally, in the various VAD performance tests, the proposed VAD method is shown to be more effective than the traditional scheme.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.41-46
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a novel voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm using feature vectors based on TE (teager energy). Specifically, power spectral deviation (PSD), which is used as the feature for the VAD in the IS-127 noise suppression algorithm, is obtained after the input signal is transfomed by Teager energy operator. In addition, the TE-based likelihhod ratio are derived in each frame to modifiy the PSD for further VAD. The performance of our proposed VAD algorithm are evaluated by objective testing (total error rate, receiver operating characteristics, perceptual evaluation of speech quality) under various environments, and it is found that the proposed method yields better results than conventional VAD algorithms in the non-stationary noise environments under 5 dB SNR (total error rate = 2.6% decrease, PESQ score = 0.053 improvement).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.139-145
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• 2014

In this paper, a feature parameter is obtained by applying the Teager energy to the WPD(Wavelet Packet Decomposition) coefficients. The threshold value is obtained based on means and standard deviations of nonspeech frames. Experimental results by using TIMIT speech and NOISEX-92 noise databases show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the typical VAD algorithm. The ROC(Receiver Operating Characteristics) curves are used to compare performance of VAD's for SNR values of ranging from 10 to -10 dB.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.59-62
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• 2005

Voice activity detection (VAD) is important in many areas of speech processing technology. Speech/nonspeech discrimination in noisy environments is a difficult task because the feature parameters used for the VAD are sensitive to the surrounding environments. Thus the VAD performance is severely degraded at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In this paper, a new VAD algorithm is proposed based on the degree of voicing and Quantile SNR (QSNR). These two feature parameters are more robust than other features such as energy and spectral entropy in noisy environments. The effectiveness of proposed algorithm is evaluated under the diverse noisy environments in the Aurora2 DB. According to out experiment, the proposed VAD outperforms the ETSI Advanced Frontend VAD.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.97-103
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a novel voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm to effectively distinguish speech from nonspeech in various noisy environments. Global speech absence probability (GSAP) derived from likelihood ratio (LR) based on the statistical model is widely used as the feature parameter for VAD. However, the feature parameter based on conventional GSAP is not sufficient to distinguish speech from noise at low SNRs (signal-to-noise ratios). The presented VAD algorithm utilizes GSAP based on Teager energy (TE) as the feature parameter to provide the improved performance of decision for speech segments in noisy environment. Performances of the proposed VAD algorithm are evaluated by objective test under various environments and better results compared with the conventional methods are obtained.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.2211-2217
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose the speech enhancement algorithm using an one-microphone in a reverberant room environments. Spectral subtraction is the effective method which can reduce the reverberation element and the noise in a spectrum domain. Spectral subtraction needs correct separation of voice section and silent section therefore to improve the performance, voice activity detection(VAD) based on entropy has been applied to the proposed method. We test a performance of the proposed method by comparing with conventional method which used VAD based on energy detection. Reverberation reduction ratio with variable of SNR and a reverberation time is used as a test index. From the simulation result, proposed method shows performance better than conventional method.