The recording device along with the acoustic environment plays a major role in digital audio forensics. We propose an acoustic source identification system in this paper, which includes identifying both the recording device and the environment in which it was recorded. A hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is used in this study to automatically extract environments and microphone features from the speech sound. In the experiments, we investigated the effect of using the voiced and unvoiced segments of speech on the accuracy of the environment and microphone classification. We also studied the effect of background noise on microphone classification in 3 different environments, i.e., very quiet, quiet, and noisy. The proposed system utilizes a subset of the KSU-DB corpus containing 3 environments, 4 classes of recording devices, 136 speakers (68 males and 68 females), and 3600 recordings of words, sentences, and continuous speech. This research combines the advantages of both CNN and RNN (in particular bidirectional LSTM) models, called CRNN. The speech signals were represented as a spectrogram and were fed to the CRNN model as 2D images. The proposed method achieved accuracies of 98% and 98.57% for environment and microphone classification, respectively, using unvoiced speech segments.

Distinctive phonetic features have an important role in Arabic speech phoneme recognition. In a given language, distinctive phonetic features are extrapolated from acoustic features using different methods. However, exploiting lengthy acoustic features vector in the sake of phoneme recognition has a huge cost in terms of computational complexity, which in turn, affects real time applications. The aim of this work is to consider methods to reduce the size of features vector employed for distinctive phonetic feature and phoneme recognition. The objective is to select the relevant input features that contribute to the speech recognition process. This, in turn, will lead to a reduced computational complexity of recognition algorithm, and an improved recognition accuracy. In the proposed approach, genetic algorithm is used to perform optimal features selection. Therefore, a baseline model based on feedforward neural networks is first built. This model is used to benchmark the results of proposed features selection method with a method that employs all elements of a features vector. Experimental results, utilizing the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Arabic Phonetic Database, show that the average genetic algorithm based phoneme overall recognition accuracy is maintained slightly higher than that of recognition method employing the full-fledge features vector. The genetic algorithm based distinctive phonetic features recognition method has achieved a 50% reduction in the dimension of the input vector while obtaining a recognition accuracy of 90%. Moreover, the results of the proposed method is validated using Wilcoxon signed rank test.

Following recent advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence, spoken language identification applications are playing an increasingly significant role in our day-to-day lives, especially in the domain of multi-lingual speech recognition. In this article, we propose a spoken language identification system that depends on the sequence of feature vectors. The proposed system uses a hybrid Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), which combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) network, for spoken language identification on seven languages, including Arabic, chosen from subsets of the Mozilla Common Voice (MCV) corpus. The proposed system exploits the advantages of both CNN and RNN architectures to construct the CRNN architecture. At the feature extraction stage, it compares the Gammatone Cepstral Coefficient (GTCC) feature and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) feature, as well as a combination of both. Finally, the speech signals were represented as frames and used as the input for the CRNN architecture. After conducting experiments, the results of the proposed system indicate higher performance with combined GTCC and MFCC features compared to GTCC or MFCC features used individually. The average accuracy of the proposed system was 92.81% in the best experiment for spoken language identification. Furthermore, the system can learn language-specific patterns in various filter size representations of speech files.

An evolutionary discrete firefly algorithm (EDFA) is presented herein to solve a real-world manufacturing system problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single machine subject to nonzero release date, sequence-dependent setup time, and periodic maintenance with the objective of minimizing the maximum completion time “makespan.” To evaluate the performance of the proposed EDFA, a new mixed-integer linear programming model is also proposed for small-sized instances. Furthermore, the parameters of the EDFA are regulated using full factorial analysis. Finally, numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the efficiency and capability of the EDFA in solving the abovementioned problem.

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Emotional speech recognition for the Arabic language is insufficiently tackled in the literature compared to other languages. In this paper, we present the work of creating and verifying the King Saud University Emotions (KSUEmotions) corpus, which was released by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) in 2017 as the first public Arabic emotional speech corpus. KSUEmotions contains an emotional speech of twenty-three speakers from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen, and includes the emotions: neutral, happiness, sadness, surprise, and anger. The corpus content is verified in two different ways: a human perceptual test by nine listeners who rate emotional performance in audio files, and automatic emotion recognition. Two automatic emotion recognition systems are experimented with: Residual Neural Network and Convolutional Neural Network. This work also experiments with emotion recognition for the English language using the Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts Corpus (EPST). The current experimental work is conducted in three tracks: (i) monolingual, where independent experiments for Arabic and English are carried out, (ii) multilingual, where the Arabic and English corpora are merged in as mixed corpus, and (iii) cross-lingual, where models are trained using one language and tested using the other. A challenge encountered in this work is that the two corpora do not contain the same emotions. That problem is tackled by mapping the emotions to the arousal-valance space.

Distinctive phonetic features (DPFs) abstractedly describe the place, manner of articulation, and voicing of the language phonemes. While DPFs are powerful features of speech signals that capture the unique articulatory characteristics of each phoneme, the task of DPF extraction is challenged by the need for efficient computational model. Unlike the ordinary acoustic features that can be directly determined form speech waveform using closed-form expressions, DPF elements are extracted from acoustic features using machine learning (ML) techniques. Therefore, for the objective of developing an acoustic-to-phonetic converter of high accuracy and low complexity, it is important to select the input acoustic features that are simple, yet carry adequate information. This paper examines the effectiveness of using spectrogram as the acoustic feature with DPFs modeled using two deep learning techniques: the deep belief network (DBN) and the convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN). The proposed method is applied on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Multi-label modeling is considered in the proposed acoustic-to-phonetic converter. The learning techniques were evaluated by proper evaluation measures that accommodate the imbalanced nature of DPF elements. The results showed that the CRNN is more accurate in extracting the DPFs than the DBN.INDEX TERMS Distinctive phonetic features, Spectrograms, speech processing, convolutional recurrent neural network, deep belief networks, KAPD corpus, Arabic, MSA.