Date

2010

Author

Özbek, İbrahim Yücel

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This thesis presents an all-inclusive framework on how the current formant tracking and audio (and/or visual)-to-articulatory inversion algorithms can be improved. The possible improvements are summarized as follows: The first part of the thesis investigates the problem of the formant frequency estimation when the number of formants to be estimated fixed or variable respectively. The fixed number of formant tracking method is based on the assumption that the number of formant frequencies is fixed along the speech utterance. The proposed algorithm is based on the combination of a dynamic programming algorithm and Kalman filtering/smoothing. In this method, the speech signal is divided into voiced and unvoiced segments, and the formant candidates are associated via dynamic programming algorithm for each voiced and unvoiced part separately. Individual adaptive Kalman filtering/smoothing is used to perform the formant frequency estimation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with some algorithms given in the literature. The variable number of formant tracking method considers those formant frequencies which are visible in the spectrogram. Therefore, the number of formant frequencies is not fixed and they can change along the speech waveform. In that case, it is also necessary to estimate the number of formants to track. For this purpose, the proposed algorithm uses extra logic (formant track start/end decision unit). The measurement update of each individual formant trajectories is handled via Kalman filters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by some examples The second part of this thesis is concerned with improving audiovisual to articulatory inversion performance. The related studies can be examined in two parts; Gaussian mixture model (GMM) regression based inversion and Jump Markov Linear System (JMLS) based inversion. GMM regression based inversion method involves modeling audio (and /or visual) and articulatory data as a joint Gaussian mixture model. The conditional expectation of this distribution gives the desired articulatory estimate. In this method, we examine the usefulness of the combination of various acoustic features and effectiveness of various types of fusion techniques in combination with audiovisual features. Also, we propose dynamic smoothing methods to smooth articulatory trajectories. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated and compared with conventional algorithms. JMLS inversion involves tying the acoustic (and/or visual) spaces and articulatory space via multiple state space representations. In this way, the articulatory inversion problem is converted into the state estimation problem where the audiovisual data are considered as measurements and articulatory positions are state variables. The proposed inversion method first learns the parameter set of the state space model via an expectation maximization (EM) based algorithm and the state estimation is handled via interactive multiple model (IMM) filter/smoother.

Subject Keywords

Electrical engineering.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12611777/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/19491

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis