TY - GEN
T1 - Formant shifting for speech intelligibility improvement in car noise environment
AU - Nathwani, Karan
AU - Daniel, Morgane
AU - Richard, Gael
AU - David, Bertrand
AU - Roussarie, Vincent
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/5/18
Y1 - 2016/5/18
N2 - In this paper, we propose a novel approach aiming at improving the intelligibility of speech in the context of in-car applications. Speech produced in noisy environments is subject to the Lombard effect which gathers a number of voice transformation effects compared to the speech produced in calm environments. To improve intelligibility of in car speech (radio, message alerts, ... ), we propose to modify the original speech signal by incorporating one of the important Lombard effect, namely the shift of the lower formant center frequencies away from the competing noise regions. The proposed approach exploits traditional Linear Prediction analysis and overlap and add synthesis. We explore several modification strategies and the merit of each modification is evaluated using both objective and subjective tests. It is in particular shown that the improvement of speech intelligibility in car noise is significantly improved for a majority of listeners.
AB - In this paper, we propose a novel approach aiming at improving the intelligibility of speech in the context of in-car applications. Speech produced in noisy environments is subject to the Lombard effect which gathers a number of voice transformation effects compared to the speech produced in calm environments. To improve intelligibility of in car speech (radio, message alerts, ... ), we propose to modify the original speech signal by incorporating one of the important Lombard effect, namely the shift of the lower formant center frequencies away from the competing noise regions. The proposed approach exploits traditional Linear Prediction analysis and overlap and add synthesis. We explore several modification strategies and the merit of each modification is evaluated using both objective and subjective tests. It is in particular shown that the improvement of speech intelligibility in car noise is significantly improved for a majority of listeners.
KW - Filter Masking
KW - Formant Shifting
KW - HINT and Car Noise Environment
KW - Lombard Effect
KW - Speech Intelligibility
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84973299919
U2 - 10.1109/ICASSP.2016.7472704
DO - 10.1109/ICASSP.2016.7472704
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84973299919
T3 - ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
SP - 5375
EP - 5379
BT - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016
Y2 - 20 March 2016 through 25 March 2016
ER -