Digital Speech

The enormous advances in digital signal processing (DSP) technology have contributed to the wide dissemination and success of speech communication devices – be it GSM and UMTS mobile telephones, digital hearing aids, or human-machine interfaces. Digital speech transmission techniques play an important role in these applications, all the more because high quality speech transmission remains essential in all current and next generation communication networks. Enhancement, coding and error concealment techniques improve the transmitted speech signal at all stages of the transmission chain, from the acoustic front-end to the sound reproduction at the receiver. Advanced speech processing algorithms help to mitigate a number of physical and technological limitations such as background noise, bandwidth restrictions, shortage of radio frequencies, and transmission errors. Digital Speech Transmission provides a single-source, comprehensive guide to the fundamental issues, algorithms, standards, and trends in speech signal processing and speech communication technology. The authors give a solid, accessible overview of fundamentals of speech signal processing speech coding, including new speech coders for GSM and UMTS error concealment by soft decoding artificial bandwidth extension of speech signals single and multi-channel noise reduction acoustic echo cancellation This text is an invaluable resource for engineers, researchers, academics, and graduate students in the areas of communications, electrical engineering, and information technology.

Speech processing and speech transmission technology are expanding fields of active research. New challenges arise from the 'anywhere, anytime' paradigm of mobile communications, the ubiquitous use of voice communication systems in noisy environments and the convergence of communication networks toward Internet based transmission protocols, such as Voice over IP. As a consequence, new speech coding, new enhancement and error concealment, and new quality assessment methods are emerging. Advances in Digital Speech Transmission provides an up-to-date overview of the field, including topics such as speech coding in heterogeneous communication networks, wideband coding, and the quality assessment of wideband speech. Provides an insight into the latest developments in speech processing and speech transmission, making it an essential reference to those working in these fields Offers a balanced overview of technology and applications Discusses topics such as speech coding in heterogeneous communications networks, wideband coding, and the quality assessment of the wideband speech Explains speech signal processing in hearing instruments and man-machine interfaces from applications point of view Covers speech coding for Voice over IP, blind source separation, digital hearing aids and speech processing for automatic speech recognition Advances in Digital Speech Transmission serves as an essential link between the basics and the type of technology and applications (prospective) engineers work on in industry labs and academia. The book will also be of interest to advanced students, researchers, and other professionals who need to brush up their knowledge in this field.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a very attractive means for human-machine interaction. The degree of maturity reached by speech recognition technologies during recent years allows the development of applications that use them. In particular, ASR shows an enormous potential in mobile environments, where devices such as mobile phones or PDAs are used, and for Internet Protocol (IP) applications. Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels is the first book of its kind to offer a complete system comprehension, addressing the topics of distributed and network-based speech recognition issues and standards, the concepts of speech processing and transmission, and system architectures and robustness. Describes the different client/server architectures for remote speech recognition systems, by means of which the client transmits speech parameters through a digital channel to a remote recognition server Focuses on robustness against both adverse acoustic environments (in the front-end) and bit errors/packet loss Discusses four ETSI standards for distributed speech recognition; the understanding of the standards and the technologies behind them Provides the necessary background for the comprehension of remote speech recognition technologies This book will appeal to a wide-ranging audience: engineers using speech recognition systems, researchers involved in ASR systems and those interested in processing and transmitting speech such as signal processing and communications communities. It will also be of interest to technical experts requiring an understanding of recognition over mobile and IP networks, and postgraduate students working on robust speech processing.

A complete overview of distant automatic speech recognition The performance of conventional Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems degrades dramatically as soon as the microphone is moved away from the mouth of the speaker. This is due to a broad variety of effects such as background noise, overlapping speech from other speakers, and reverberation. While traditional ASR systems underperform for speech captured with far-field sensors, there are a number of novel techniques within the recognition system as well as techniques developed in other areas of signal processing that can mitigate the deleterious effects of noise and reverberation, as well as separating speech from overlapping speakers. Distant Speech Recognitionpresents a contemporary and comprehensive description of both theoretic abstraction and practical issues inherent in the distant ASR problem. Key Features: Covers the entire topic of distant ASR and offers practical solutions to overcome the problems related to it Provides documentation and sample scripts to enable readers to construct state-of-the-art distant speech recognition systems Gives relevant background information in acoustics and filter techniques, Explains the extraction and enhancement of classification relevant speech features Describes maximum likelihood as well as discriminative parameter estimation, and maximum likelihood normalization techniques Discusses the use of multi-microphone configurations for speaker tracking and channel combination Presents several applications of the methods and technologies described in this book Accompanying website with open source software and tools to construct state-of-the-art distant speech recognition systems This reference will be an invaluable resource for researchers, developers, engineers and other professionals, as well as advanced students in speech technology, signal processing, acoustics, statistics and artificial intelligence fields.

The text sets out in simple and accessible terms the various methods of acoustic analysis of speech, placing them in their historical context, allowing a better understanding of the mathematical and technical solutions adopted today in phonetics and experimental phonology. Without mathematical complications, the operating bases of the many speech analysis software currently available are exposed so that everyone can understand the limits and avoid errors and misinterpretations in their implementation.

Speech processing addresses various scientific and technological areas. It includes speech analysis and variable rate coding, in order to store or transmit speech. It also covers speech synthesis, especially from text, speech recognition, including speaker and language identification, and spoken language understanding. This book covers the following topics: how to realize speech production and perception systems, how to synthesize and understand speech using state-of-the-art methods in signal processing, pattern recognition, stochastic modelling computational linguistics and human factor studies.

With a growing need for understanding the process involved in producing and perceiving spoken language, this timely publication answers these questions in an accessible reference. Containing material resulting from many years’ teaching and research, Speech Synthesis provides a complete account of the theory of speech. By bringing together the common goals and methods of speech synthesis into a single resource, the book will lead the way towards a comprehensive view of the process involved in human speech. The book includes applications in speech technology and speech synthesis. It is ideal for intermediate students of linguistics and phonetics who wish to proceed further, as well as researchers and engineers in telecommunications working in speech technology and speech synthesis who need a comprehensive overview of the field and who wish to gain an understanding of the objectives and achievements of the study of speech production and perception.

Finally a comprehensive overview of speech quality in VoIP from the user’s perspective! Speech Quality of VoIP is an essential guide to assessing the speech quality of VoIP networks, whilst addressing the implications for the design of VoIP networks and systems. This book bridges the gap between the technical network-world and the psychoacoustic world of quality perception. Alexander Raake’s unique perspective combines awareness of the technical characteristics of VoIP networks and original research concerning the perception of speech transmitted across them. Starting from the network designer’s point of view, the different characteristics of the network are addressed, and then linked to features perceived by users. This book provides an overview of the available knowledge on the principal, relevant aspects of speech and speech quality perception, of speech quality assessment, and of transmission properties of telephone and VoIP networks, and of the related perceptual features and resulting speech quality. Discussing new research into the specific time-varying degradations VoIP brings along, but also the considerable potential of quality improvement to be achieved with wideband speech transmission, Alexander Raake demonstrates how network and service characteristics impact on the users perception of quality. Speech Quality of VoIP: Offers an insight into speech quality of VoIP from a user's perspective. Presents an overview of different modelling approaches and a parametric network-planning model for quality prediction in VoIP networks. Draws on innovative new research on the quality degradation characteristic of VoIP. Explains in detail how telephone speech quality can be greatly enhanced with VoIP’s wideband speech transmission capability. Assesses the vast collection of references into the technical and scientific literature related to VoIP quality. Illustrates concepts throughout with mathematical models, algorithms and simulations. Speech Quality of VoIP is the definitive guide for researchers, engineers and network planners working in the field of VoIP, Quality of Service, and speech communication processing in telecommunications. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students on telecommunication and networking courses will also find this text an invaluable resource.

The Handbook of Speech Production is the first reference work to provide an overview of this burgeoning area of study. Twenty-four chapters written by an international team of authors examine issues in speech planning, motor control, the physical aspects of speech production, and external factors that impact speech production. Contributions bring together behavioral, clinical, computational, developmental, and neuropsychological perspectives on speech production to create a rich and truly interdisciplinary resource Offers a novel and timely contribution to the literature and showcases a broad spectrum of research in speech production, methodological advances, and modeling Coverage of planning, motor control, articulatory coordination, the speech mechanism, and the effect of language on production processes

A wide-ranging and authoritative volume exploring contemporary perceptual research on speech, updated with new original essays by leading researchers Speech perception is a dynamic area of study that encompasses a wide variety of disciplines, including cognitive neuroscience, phonetics, linguistics, physiology and biophysics, auditory and speech science, and experimental psychology. The Handbook of Speech Perception , Second Edition, is a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of technical and theoretical developments in perceptual research on human speech. Offering a variety of perspectives on the perception of spoken language, this volume provides original essays by leading researchers on the major issues and most recent findings in the field. Each chapter provides an informed and critical survey, including a summary of current research and debate, clear examples and research findings, and discussion of anticipated advances and potential research directions. The timely second edition of this valuable resource: Discusses a uniquely broad range of both foundational and emerging issues in the field Surveys the major areas of the field of human speech perception Features newly commissioned essays on the relation between speech perception and reading, features in speech perception and lexical access, perceptual identification of individual talkers, and perceptual learning of accented speech Includes essential revisions of many chapters original to the first edition Offers critical introductions to recent research literature and leading field developments Encourages the development of multidisciplinary research on speech perception Provides readers with clear understanding of the aims, methods, challenges, and prospects for advances in the field The Handbook of Speech Perception , Second Edition, is ideal for both specialists and non-specialists throughout the research community looking for a comprehensive view of the latest technical and theoretical accomplishments in the field.