Enhancement of esophageal speech using formant synthesis

Author

Matsui, Kenji ; Hara, Noriyo

Author_Institution

Central Res. Lab., Matsushita Electr. Ind. Co. Ltd., Seika, Japan

Volume

1

fYear

1999

fDate

15-19 Mar 1999

Firstpage

81

Abstract

The feasibility of using the formant analysis-synthesis approach to replace the voicing sources of esophageal speech was explored. The voicing sources were generated by using inverse-filtered signals extracted from normal speakers. Pitch extraction was tested with various pitch extraction methods, then a simple auto-correlation method was chosen. A special hardware unit was designed to perform the analysis-synthesis process in real-time. Results of a subjective test showed that the synthesized speech was significantly improved

Keywords

correlation methods; high-pass filters; inverse problems; low-pass filters; speech enhancement; speech synthesis; auto-correlation method; esophageal speech enhancement; formant analysis-synthesis approach; formant synthesis; inverse-filtered signals; pitch extraction; synthesized speech; voicing sources; Autocorrelation; Esophagus; Hardware; Performance analysis; Signal generators; Signal synthesis; Speech analysis; Speech enhancement; Speech synthesis; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. Proceedings., 1999 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Phoenix, AZ

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5041-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.1999.758067

Filename

758067