Robust feature extraction for automatic speech recognition. Speech is perhaps the most natural and efficient mode of communication for humans. Therefore, it has always been a dream for many people to communicate with machines via speech. Significant advances have been made in the last five decades in the area of automatic speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognisers work reasonably well in noise-free office environments, their performance deteriorates drastically when th ....Robust feature extraction for automatic speech recognition. Speech is perhaps the most natural and efficient mode of communication for humans. Therefore, it has always been a dream for many people to communicate with machines via speech. Significant advances have been made in the last five decades in the area of automatic speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognisers work reasonably well in noise-free office environments, their performance deteriorates drastically when they are deployed in real-life situations due to the presence of background noise and other distortions. The problem of robust speech recognition will be researched in this project. Read moreRead less
Robust speech recognition in realistic hostile environments. Australia leads the world in the adoption of speech recognition technology but sadly lags in the development of the fundamental advances in the area. This research will help propel Australia to the forefront of new innovations in speech recognition technology and contributions to fundamental science. Our project will provide an excellent training ground for graduate students and researchers, with the real possibility of significant com ....Robust speech recognition in realistic hostile environments. Australia leads the world in the adoption of speech recognition technology but sadly lags in the development of the fundamental advances in the area. This research will help propel Australia to the forefront of new innovations in speech recognition technology and contributions to fundamental science. Our project will provide an excellent training ground for graduate students and researchers, with the real possibility of significant commercial benefit to the nation. The deployment of our system in the community will greatly enhance the defence and police forces ability for surveillance and security, and will provide new assistive aids to improve the quality of life and safety for the elderly and disabled.Read moreRead less
Enhanced Multilingual Speaker Recognition through the Incorporation of High-Level Features, Late Fusion and Discriminative Classification Methods. The development of robust multilingual speaker recognition systems will benefit the community through the elimination of fraud incurred by financial institutions and customers by enabling several person authentication applications such as: voice based signatures and document issuance; credit card verification by voice and secure over-the-phone financi ....Enhanced Multilingual Speaker Recognition through the Incorporation of High-Level Features, Late Fusion and Discriminative Classification Methods. The development of robust multilingual speaker recognition systems will benefit the community through the elimination of fraud incurred by financial institutions and customers by enabling several person authentication applications such as: voice based signatures and document issuance; credit card verification by voice and secure over-the-phone financial transactions. The technology will also assist in the protection of the community and safeguard Australia by enabling the implementation of the following: suspect identification using voice print; national security measures for combating terrorism by using voice to locate and track terrorists; preemptive criminal activity counter-measures; surveillance and secure building access by voice.Read moreRead less
Robust speaker recognition with reduced utterance duration and intersession variability. The development of robust and accurate speaker recognition systems will enable secure person authentication in over-the-phone financial transactions and benefit the community through the elimination of identity fraud incurred by customers and financial institutions. The technology will also assist in safeguarding Australia by enabling the implementation of suspect identification using voice and security meas ....Robust speaker recognition with reduced utterance duration and intersession variability. The development of robust and accurate speaker recognition systems will enable secure person authentication in over-the-phone financial transactions and benefit the community through the elimination of identity fraud incurred by customers and financial institutions. The technology will also assist in safeguarding Australia by enabling the implementation of suspect identification using voice and security measures for combating terrorism by using voice to locate and track terrorists. Our research at QUT Speech Research Lab is at the forefront of development in this field and will provide Australia with a technological advantage in the rapidly evolving global market for speaker recognition technology for person authentication applications.Read moreRead less
Visual Solutions for Automated Translation Between Spoken and Signed Languages. We propose to build a robust visual speech recognition system that analyzes images of spoken language and achieves a recognition of the utterances with at least human expert recognition rates. This visual speech recognition system will then be integrated with our existing gesture recognition system to improve performance, just as humans combine visual and audio data for language understanding. The result will be a sy ....Visual Solutions for Automated Translation Between Spoken and Signed Languages. We propose to build a robust visual speech recognition system that analyzes images of spoken language and achieves a recognition of the utterances with at least human expert recognition rates. This visual speech recognition system will then be integrated with our existing gesture recognition system to improve performance, just as humans combine visual and audio data for language understanding. The result will be a system providing translation between English and the Australian sign language Auslan in a practical application domain. Significantly, our work will provide insights into the cognitive models of neural activity linking language and gesture.Read moreRead less
Robust Automatic Speaker Diarisation of Audio Documents by Exploiting Prior Sources of Information. Speaker Diarisation, the task of determining who spoke when, is a technology fundamental in deriving intelligent information from audio and multimedia resources. The requirement for efficient and accurate Speaker Diarisation systems, portable across different domains is heightened by the explosive growth of audio and multimedia archives online and throughout the world. This research will provide t ....Robust Automatic Speaker Diarisation of Audio Documents by Exploiting Prior Sources of Information. Speaker Diarisation, the task of determining who spoke when, is a technology fundamental in deriving intelligent information from audio and multimedia resources. The requirement for efficient and accurate Speaker Diarisation systems, portable across different domains is heightened by the explosive growth of audio and multimedia archives online and throughout the world. This research will provide the foundation for a commercial service of automatic Speaker Diarisation to be developed, growing Australia's impact on the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The outcome of this research will also assist in the tracking of terrorist and unlawful activity by enabling effective intelligence gathering from different audio sources.Read moreRead less
Bio-inspired speech analysis: Specialised information processing of vocalisations in the auditory brainstem. This project has the potential to benefit bionic ear and hearing aid users through the development of signal processing methods that mimic the amazing abilities of the brain. Speech perception performance by bionic ear users has reached a plateau and these new strategies could produce the breakthrough needed to provide the next increase in performance. The benefit for greater improved hea ....Bio-inspired speech analysis: Specialised information processing of vocalisations in the auditory brainstem. This project has the potential to benefit bionic ear and hearing aid users through the development of signal processing methods that mimic the amazing abilities of the brain. Speech perception performance by bionic ear users has reached a plateau and these new strategies could produce the breakthrough needed to provide the next increase in performance. The benefit for greater improved hearing has enormous benefit and potential for improving the quality of life of the hearing impaired, especially those with severe and profound hearing loss. In addition, the algorithms may provide more robust automatic speech recognition, making this technology more useful in everyday situations; the markets that this would open up are enormous.Read moreRead less
Audio Visual Speech Recognition. Even though significant advances have been made in automatic speech recognition using acoustic information, the recognition accuracies are still poor in noisy and hostile environments such as in crowds, traffic, factory floors etc. In many of these applications visual information is or can easily be made available in addition to the audio. The aim of this project is to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in speech recognition accuracies in adverse environme ....Audio Visual Speech Recognition. Even though significant advances have been made in automatic speech recognition using acoustic information, the recognition accuracies are still poor in noisy and hostile environments such as in crowds, traffic, factory floors etc. In many of these applications visual information is or can easily be made available in addition to the audio. The aim of this project is to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in speech recognition accuracies in adverse environments by joint processing and modelling of the acoustic modality with visual information in the form of lip shapes and movements. The outcomes will be useful in human computer interaction in adverse environments as well as in the transcription and mining of multimedia data.
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Frequency-related features derived from phase spectrum for robust speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognizers work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. In order to overcome this problem, new frequency-related features are proposed in this project for speech recognition. These features are derived from the phase spectrum of the speech signal, and are expected to be robust t ....Frequency-related features derived from phase spectrum for robust speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognizers work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. In order to overcome this problem, new frequency-related features are proposed in this project for speech recognition. These features are derived from the phase spectrum of the speech signal, and are expected to be robust to the additive noise distortion. These features will make the speech recognizer less sensitive to noise and will enhance its utility in a number of applications in the telecommunication and business world.Read moreRead less
Fixed and variable-length segment vocoders for very low bitrate speech coding. Reliable and secure voice communication is an important aspect of military and defence operations. In order to reduce the possibility of interception, low power transmitters are normally used for radio communications, where the bandwidth is often very low. Military voice communication, therefore, requires the coding of speech at very low bitrates. Our research proposal aims to develop speech coders that can operate ....Fixed and variable-length segment vocoders for very low bitrate speech coding. Reliable and secure voice communication is an important aspect of military and defence operations. In order to reduce the possibility of interception, low power transmitters are normally used for radio communications, where the bandwidth is often very low. Military voice communication, therefore, requires the coding of speech at very low bitrates. Our research proposal aims to develop speech coders that can operate at lower bitrates and reproduce speech of high quality and intelligibility. This is highly beneficial to the defence forces of Australia as it will permit the use of high-grade encryption technology to improve the security of transmission.Read moreRead less