Robust Whisper Activity Detection Using Long-Term Log Energy Variation of Sub-Band Signal

Meenakshi, Nisha G and Ghosh, Prasanta Kumar (2015) Robust Whisper Activity Detection Using Long-Term Log Energy Variation of Sub-Band Signal. In: IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, 22 (11). pp. 1859-1863.

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Abstract

The goal in the whisper activity detection (WAD) is to find the whispered speech segments in a given noisy recording of whispered speech. Since whispering lacks the periodic glottal excitation, it resembles an unvoiced speech. This noise-like nature of the whispered speech makes WAD a more challenging task compared to a typical voice activity detection (VAD) problem. In this paper, we propose a feature based on the long term variation of the logarithm of the short-time sub-band signal energy for WAD. We also propose an automatic sub-band selection algorithm to maximally discriminate noisy whisper from noise. Experiments with eight noise types in four different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions show that, for most of the noises, the performance of the proposed WAD scheme is significantly better than that of the existing VAD schemes and whisper detection schemes when used for WAD.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS
Publisher:	IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
Additional Information:	Copy right for this article belongs to the IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC, 445 HOES LANE, PISCATAWAY, NJ 08855-4141 USA
Keywords:	Long-term signal measure; sub-band selection; whisper activity detection; whispered speech
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited:	23 Jul 2015 09:25
Last Modified:	23 Jul 2015 09:25
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/51906

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