TASLPRO Articles

A key task for speech recognition systems is to reduce the mismatch between training and evaluation data that is often attributable to speaker differences. Speaker adaptation techniques play a vital role to reduce the mismatch. Model-based speaker adaptation approaches often require sufficient amounts of target speaker data to ensure robustness. 

Most of the existing feature representations for spoofing countermeasures consider information either from the magnitude or phase spectrum. We hypothesize that both magnitude and phase spectra can be beneficial for spoofing detection (SD) when collectively used to capture the signal artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel feature referred to as modified magnitude-phase spectrum (MMPS) to capture both magnitude and phase information from the speech signal. 

Voice and face are two most popular biometrics for person verification, usually used in speaker verification and face verification tasks. It has already been observed that simply combining the information from these two modalities can lead to a more powerful and robust person verification system.

Geometry calibration is an inherent challenge in distributed acoustic sensor networks. To mitigate this problem, a passive geometry calibration approach based on distributed damped Newton optimization is proposed. Specifically, a geometric cost function incorporating direction of arrivals (DoAs) and time difference of arrivals (TDoAs) is first formulated, and then its identifiability conditions are given.

Speaker diarization is an important problem that is topical, and is especially useful as a preprocessor for conversational speech related applications. The objective of this article is two-fold: (i) segment initialization by uniformly distributing speaker information across the initial segments, and (ii) incorporating speaker discriminative features within the unsupervised diarization framework. In the first part of the work, a varying length segment initialization technique for Information Bottleneck (IB) based speaker diarization system using phoneme rate as the side information is proposed. This initialization distributes speaker information uniformly across the segments and provides a better starting point for IB based clustering. 

One practical requirement of the music copyright management is the estimation of music relative loudness, which is mostly ignored in existing music detection works. To solve this problem, we study the joint task of music detection and music relative loudness estimation. To be specific, we observe that the joint task has two characteristics, i.e., temporality and hierarchy, which could facilitate to obtain the solution. For example, a tiny fragment of audio is temporally related to its neighbor fragments because they may all belong to the same event, and the event classes of the fragment in the two tasks have a hierarchical relationship. Based on the above observation, we reformulate the joint task as hierarchical event detection and localization problem. To solve this problem, we further propose Hierarchical Regulated Iterative Networks (HRIN), which includes two variants, termed as HRIN-r and HRIN-cr, which are based on recurrent and convolutional recurrent modules. 

We consider the problem of localizing the source using range, and range-difference measurements. Both the problems are non-convex, and non-smooth, and are challenging to solve. In this article, we develop an iterative algorithm - Source Localization Via an Iterative technique (SOLVIT) to localize the source using all the distinct range-difference measurements, i.e., without choosing a reference sensor.

Personal Sound Zones (PSZ) systems aim to render independent sound signals to multiple listeners within a room by using arrays of loudspeakers. One of the algorithms used to provide PSZ is Weighted Pressure Matching (wPM), which computes the filters required to render a desired response in the listening zones while reducing the acoustic energy arriving to the quiet zones.

This paper presents a robust beamformer for stereo noise reduction in hearing aid applications. The worst-case optimization method was applied to the binaural minimum-variance distortionless-response (BMVDR) beamformer, for providing robustness against parameter estimation inaccuracies.

The filtered-x least-mean-square (FxLMS) algorithm has been widely used for the active noise control. A fundamental analysis of the convergence behavior of the FxLMS algorithm, including the transient and steady-state performance, could provide some new insights into the algorithm and can be also helpful for its practical applications, e.g., the choice of the step size.