Segmentation and its real-world applications in speech processing

The speech segmentation problem can be formulated as estimating the locations and durations of speech and non-speech components of the measured speech data. In this paper, a new time-scale transform based segmentation method and one of its important application in speech processing, are presented. The proposed scheme is tested on a number of recorded speech data. The preliminary results are shown quite promising. It is found that the method is able to extract the speech components(i.e. active intervals) from non-speech components (i.e. inactive intervals) effectively. The method is, therefore, successfully applied to insert selective pauses in the speech before delivering in the reverberant environment and improve the quality/intelligibility of the delivered speech.