Alaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on One-to-Many Eigenvoice Conversion

Doi, Hironori; Toda, Tomoki; Nakamura, Keigo; Saruwatari, Hiroshi; Shikano, Kiyohiro

doi:10.1109/taslp.2013.2286917

Cited by 49 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…It can be seen that a slight improvement is yielded by SS. On the other hand, VC causes significant degradation as reported in [3]. SS+VC doesn't cause a degradation compared with EL but it still causes a very small degradation compared with SS.…”

Section: Subjective Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Note that the VC-based enhancement method generally causes a significant degradation in intelligibility (around 3% word recognition rate reduction) compared to EL speech as reported in [3]. All tests were performed by 5 listeners.…”

Section: Subjective Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…One is based on noise reduction [1] and the other is based on statistical voice conversion (VC) [2], [3]. The former approach aims to reduce the effect of the excitation sounds leaked from the electrolarynx by using noise reduction techniques, such as spectral subtraction (SS) [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, it is possible to convert from a spectral parameter sequence of EL speech into F 0 patterns of natural voices. However, VC-based approaches usually cause degradation in intelligibility owing to errors in conversion [3]. Even if naturalness is significantly improved compared to EL speech, the enhanced speech suffering from degradation from another perspective will have less chance of being accepted by actual users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

A Hybrid Approach to Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on Noise Reduction and Statistical Excitation Generation

Tanaka

Toda

Neubig

et al. 2014

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYThis paper presents an electrolaryngeal (EL) speech enhancement method capable of significantly improving naturalness of EL speech while causing no degradation in its intelligibility. An electrolarynx is an external device that artificially generates excitation sounds to enable laryngectomees to produce EL speech. Although proficient laryngectomees can produce quite intelligible EL speech, it sounds very unnatural due to the mechanical excitation produced by the device. Moreover, the excitation sounds produced by the device often leak outside, adding to EL speech as noise. To address these issues, there are mainly two conventional approached to EL speech enhancement through either noise reduction or statistical voice conversion (VC). The former approach usually causes no degradation in intelligibility but yields only small improvements in naturalness as the mechanical excitation sounds remain essentially unchanged. On the other hand, the latter approach significantly improves naturalness of EL speech using spectral and excitation parameters of natural voices converted from acoustic parameters of EL speech, but it usually causes degradation in intelligibility owing to errors in conversion. We propose a hybrid approach using a noise reduction method for enhancing spectral parameters and statistical voice conversion method for predicting excitation parameters. Moreover, we further modify the prediction process of the excitation parameters to improve its prediction accuracy and reduce adverse effects caused by unvoiced/voiced prediction errors. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method yields significant improvements in naturalness compared with EL speech while keeping intelligibility high enough.

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Section: Subjective Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Subjective Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A Hybrid Approach to Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on Noise Reduction and Statistical Excitation Generation

Tanaka

Toda

Neubig

et al. 2014

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…The total number of mixture components is M. The corresponding joint feature vectors can be obtained by performing automatic frame alignment with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). To align F 0 patterns of normal speech and spectral parameters of EL speech, we use alignments which are obtained by using spectral parameters of EL speech and normal speech in the same manner as in [8], [13].…”

Section: Training Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Vibration Control Method of an Electrolarynx Based on Statistical <i>F</i><sub>0</sub> Pattern Prediction

Tanaka

Toda

Nakamura

2017

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARY This paper presents a novel speaking aid system to help laryngectomees produce more naturally sounding electrolaryngeal (EL) speech. An electrolarynx is an external device to generate excitation signals, instead of vibration of the vocal folds. Although the conventional EL speech is quite intelligible, its naturalness suffers from the unnatural fundamental frequency (F 0 ) patterns of the mechanically generated excitation signals. To improve the naturalness of EL speech, we have proposed EL speech enhancement methods using statistical F 0 pattern prediction. In these methods, the original EL speech recorded by a microphone is presented from a loudspeaker after performing the speech enhancement. These methods are effective for some situation, such as telecommunication, but it is not suitable for face-to-face conversation because not only the enhanced EL speech but also the original EL speech is presented to listeners. In this paper, to develop an EL speech enhancement also effective for face-to-face conversation, we propose a method for directly controlling F 0 patterns of the excitation signals to be generated from the electrolarynx using the statistical F 0 prediction. To get an "actual feel" of the proposed system, we also implement a prototype system. By using the prototype system, we find latency issues caused by a real-time processing. To address these latency issues, we furthermore propose segmental continuous F 0 pattern modeling and forthcoming F 0 pattern modeling. With evaluations through simulation, we demonstrate that our proposed system is capable of effectively addressing the issues of latency and those of electrolarynx in term of the naturalness.

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Development of a hands‐free electrolarynx for obtaining a human‐like voice using the LPC residual wave

Takeuchi

Soejima

Ahn

et al. 2022

Electrical Engineering Japan

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Alaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on One-to-Many Eigenvoice Conversion

Cited by 49 publications

References 24 publications

A Hybrid Approach to Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on Noise Reduction and Statistical Excitation Generation

A Hybrid Approach to Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on Noise Reduction and Statistical Excitation Generation

A Vibration Control Method of an Electrolarynx Based on Statistical <i>F</i><sub>0</sub> Pattern Prediction

Development of a hands‐free electrolarynx for obtaining a human‐like voice using the LPC residual wave

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