Recent Patents in Signal Processing (September 2013) - Speech Processing

For our September 2013 issue, we return to the topic of Speech Processing. We had last covered recent patents in the area of Speech Processing in September 2011. Below, we consider several recent inventions comprising fundamental techniques for speech recognition as well as emerging applications of speech recognition.

Number:  8,515,767
Title:  Technique for encoding/decoding of codebook indices for quantized MDCT spectrum in scalable speech and audio codecs
Inventors: Y. Reznik
Issued: August 20, 2013
Assignee: QUALCOMM Incorporated (San Diego, CA)

Number:  8,515,756
Title: Age determination using speech
Inventors: K. Witzman
Issued: August 20, 2013
Assignee:  Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc. (Basking Ridge, NJ)

Number:  8,510,412
Title:  Web-based speech recognition with scripting and semantic objects
Inventors: J. Kroeker and O. Boulanov
Issued: August 13, 2013
Assignee: Eliza Corporation (Beverly, MA)

Number: 8,504,362
Title: Noise reduction for speech recognition in a moving vehicle
Inventors: S. J. Lee at al.
Issued: August 6, 2013
Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (Daejeon, Korea)

Number:  8,484,024
Title:  Phonetic features for speech recognition
Inventors: D. Kanevsky, D. Nahamoo, B. Ramabhadran, and T. Sainath.
Issued: July 9, 2013
Assignee:  Nuance Communications, Inc. (Burlington, MA)

Number: 8,484,023
Title:  Sparse representation features for speech recognition
Inventors: D. Kanevsky, D. Nahamoo, B. Ramabhadran, and T. Sainath.
Issued:July 9, 2013
Assignee:  Nuance Communications, Inc. (Burlington, MA)

Number:  8,478,593
Title:  Enhanced accuracy for speech recognition grammars
Inventors: H. Blanchard, S. Lewis, S. Sivaprasad, L. Zhang
Issued:July 2, 2013
Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property II, L.P. (Atlanta, GA)

Number: 8,442,833
Title: Speech processing with source location estimation using signals from two or more microphones
Inventors: R. Chen
Issued: May 14, 2013
Assignee:  Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (Tokyo, Japan)

Number: 8,392,194
Title: System and method for machine-based determination of speech intelligibility in an aircraft during flight operations
Inventors: N. Agarwal
Issued:March 5, 2013
Assignee:  The Boeing Company (Chicago, IL)

Number: 8,428,940
Title: Metadata-based weighting of geotagged environmental audio for enhanced speech recognition accuracy
Inventors: T. Kristjansson, M. Lloyd
Issued: April 23, 2013
Assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)

If you have an interesting patent to share when we next feature patents related to speech processing, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).