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 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
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
Adaptive learning of spatiotemporal patterns: Development of multi-layer spiking neuron networks using Hebbian and competitive learning. The aim of this project is to develop a method for recognising patterns that change in time. The development of a reliable method that is fast and robust to noise will have wide application in many areas, especially computer speech recognition where timing plays a crucial role. Building-blocks similar to those in the brain (spiking neurons) will be used. Aut ....Adaptive learning of spatiotemporal patterns: Development of multi-layer spiking neuron networks using Hebbian and competitive learning. The aim of this project is to develop a method for recognising patterns that change in time. The development of a reliable method that is fast and robust to noise will have wide application in many areas, especially computer speech recognition where timing plays a crucial role. Building-blocks similar to those in the brain (spiking neurons) will be used. Automatic techniques will be used to teach groups of spiking neurons the differences between sequences of events by adjusting connections between them. The significance of this approach is that it captures information about timing that is missed in existing techniques.Read moreRead less
Adaptive learning in networks of spiking neurons for recognising patterns that change with time. The aim of this project is to develop a method for recognising patterns that change with time. Building-blocks similar to those in the brain (spiking neurons) will be used. Automatic techniques will be developed to teach groups of spiking neurons the differences between sequences of events by adjusting connections between neurons. The significance of this approach is that it captures information abou ....Adaptive learning in networks of spiking neurons for recognising patterns that change with time. The aim of this project is to develop a method for recognising patterns that change with time. Building-blocks similar to those in the brain (spiking neurons) will be used. Automatic techniques will be developed to teach groups of spiking neurons the differences between sequences of events by adjusting connections between neurons. The significance of this approach is that it captures information about timing that is missed in existing techniques. The development of a reliable method that is fast and robust to noise will have wide application in many areas, especially computer speech recognition where timing plays a crucial role.Read moreRead less
Temporal Pattern Learning and Recognition in Neural Systems. This project is relevant to the National Research Priority area of Frontier Technologies and addresses fundamental cross-disciplinary issues of how neural systems learn patterns that change with time, which is at the cutting edge of intelligent processing systems. Applications are in rapidly growing fields of automatic speech processing, robotics, machine learning and intelligent systems, all with applications in areas of economic impo ....Temporal Pattern Learning and Recognition in Neural Systems. This project is relevant to the National Research Priority area of Frontier Technologies and addresses fundamental cross-disciplinary issues of how neural systems learn patterns that change with time, which is at the cutting edge of intelligent processing systems. Applications are in rapidly growing fields of automatic speech processing, robotics, machine learning and intelligent systems, all with applications in areas of economic importance. Application to cochlear implant speech processing will provide benefit for the hearing impaired. The project will provide students with training at an international level within Australia, thus helping ensure Australia maintains and extends its science and technology base into the future.Read moreRead less
Building a Talking Head via Dynamic & 3D-Static, and Age- & Ethnically-Varied Databases: Perceptibility and Acceptability. This project will provide cutting edge realistic, perceptible talking head animation. Based on rich 3D face motion and static face databases, it will allow the study of the facial structure of specific groups of people, and the creation of a lasting cultural heritage of faces. Information in these databases will be useful for research in high-quality 3D face reconstruction ....Building a Talking Head via Dynamic & 3D-Static, and Age- & Ethnically-Varied Databases: Perceptibility and Acceptability. This project will provide cutting edge realistic, perceptible talking head animation. Based on rich 3D face motion and static face databases, it will allow the study of the facial structure of specific groups of people, and the creation of a lasting cultural heritage of faces. Information in these databases will be useful for research in high-quality 3D face reconstruction, with applications as wide as multimodal Biometric Identification, finding lost children, and security systems. The novel methods in this project will also advance auditory-visual speech and emotion research with particular commercial applications in telecommunications, human-machine interfaces, foreign language teaching, humanoid development, animation, and film.Read moreRead less