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Addressing Effects of Formant Dispersion and Pitch Sensitivity for the Development of Children’s KWS System

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14338))

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Abstract

The accuracy of an automatic keyword spotting (KWS) system is observed to reduce in presence of mismatches such as pitch, speaking rate, formant dispersion, and background noise. To address these mismatches to some extent, this paper proposes a simple and efficient technique through front-end speech parameterization. In the proposed approach, firstly, the formant dispersion is suppressed by temporal averaging of the short-term magnitude spectra (ST-MS) over adjacent frames. Next, the high-frequency oscillations due to pitch harmonics are smoothed out by processing through a low-pass data adaptive single pole filter (DA-SPF), whose pole value changes adaptively for each analysis frame. It provides a non-uniform spectral smoothing for voiced and non-voiced speech frames. The Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) extracted from the smoothed spectra is appended with five logarithmically compressed resonant peaks to construct the acoustic feature termed as temporal averaged smoothed spectra (TASS)-MFCC-ARP. The TASS-MFCC-ARP results in a relative improvement of \(104.07\%\) compared to baseline MFCC for pitch mismatched test conditions on a deep neural network - hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) based KWS system. As the bandwidth of filters used for computation of MFCC has a direct impact on pitch harmonics of ST-MS, we have next studied the performance of the proposed feature for varying sizes of Mel-filterbank. A notable performance gain for the KWS system is shown by decreasing the Mel-filterbank size. A further improvement in pitch and speaking rate variations is also achieved by data-augmented training through prosody modification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, NIT, Patna, Patna, India

    Jayant Kumar Rout & Gayadhar Pradhan

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  1. Jayant Kumar Rout
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  2. Gayadhar Pradhan
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Correspondence to Jayant Kumar Rout .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexey Karpov

  2. Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram, India

    K. Samudravijaya

  3. Indian Institute of Information Technology Dharwad, Dharwad, India

    K. T. Deepak

  4. Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, Dharwad, India

    Rajesh M. Hegde

  5. KIIT Group of Colleges, Gurugram, India

    Shyam S. Agrawal

  6. Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, Dharwad, India

    S. R. Mahadeva Prasanna

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Rout, J.K., Pradhan, G. (2023). Addressing Effects of Formant Dispersion and Pitch Sensitivity for the Development of Children’s KWS System. In: Karpov, A., Samudravijaya, K., Deepak, K.T., Hegde, R.M., Agrawal, S.S., Prasanna, S.R.M. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14338. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_42

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48309-7

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