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
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
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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Automatic audio segmentation, classification, identification, search and retrieval. The research aims to develop generic tools for automated audio segmentation, classification, identification and search, with lowest possible computational complexity and highest accuracy and speed. The tools will be applicable to audio archive management, search of audio material over WWW and personal archives of music and audio-assisted video analysis. The industry will use the tools for automated broadcast ve ....Automatic audio segmentation, classification, identification, search and retrieval. The research aims to develop generic tools for automated audio segmentation, classification, identification and search, with lowest possible computational complexity and highest accuracy and speed. The tools will be applicable to audio archive management, search of audio material over WWW and personal archives of music and audio-assisted video analysis. The industry will use the tools for automated broadcast verification and identification for copyright surveillance and calculation of royalty payments, aiming to penetrate both Australian and overseas markets. The area of real-time audio scene analysis is in its infancy and the research aims to make significant contributions to this area.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
Physiologically accurate audio processing in cochlear implants. This project proposes to use a physiologically motivated computational model of the cochlea, which along with newly developed cochlear-implant electrode technology will produce the next quantum improvement in speech intelligibility and quality of hearing for implant recipients.
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