Source and filter estimation for Throat-Microphone speech enhancement

Date
2016
Authors
Turan, M. A. T.
Erzin, E.
Editor(s)
Advisor
Supervisor
Co-Advisor
Co-Supervisor
Instructor
Source Title
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing
Print ISSN
2329-9290
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Volume
24
Issue
2
Pages
265 - 275
Language
English
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Series
Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new statistical enhancement system for throat microphone recordings through source and filter separation. Throat microphones (TM) are skin-attached piezoelectric sensors that can capture speech sound signals in the form of tissue vibrations. Due to their limited bandwidth, TM recorded speech suffers from intelligibility and naturalness. In this paper, we investigate learning phone-dependent Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based statistical mappings using parallel recordings of acoustic microphone (AM) and TM for enhancement of the spectral envelope and excitation signals of the TM speech. The proposed mappings address the phone-dependent variability of tissue conduction with TM recordings. While the spectral envelope mapping estimates the line spectral frequency (LSF) representation of AM from TM recordings, the excitation mapping is constructed based on the spectral energy difference (SED) of AM and TM excitation signals. The excitation enhancement is modeled as an estimation of the SED features from the TM signal. The proposed enhancement system is evaluated using both objective and subjective tests. Objective evaluations are performed with the log-spectral distortion (LSD), the wideband perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and mean-squared error (MSE) metrics. Subjective evaluations are performed with an A/B comparison test. Experimental results indicate that the proposed phone-dependent mappings exhibit enhancements over phone-independent mappings. Furthermore enhancement of the TM excitation through statistical mappings of the SED features introduces significant objective and subjective performance improvements to the enhancement of TM recordings. ©2015 IEEE.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)