185 results about "Formant" patented technology

Method for improving speaker identification by determining usable speech. Degraded speech is preprocessed in a speaker identification (SID) process to produce SID usable and SID unusable segments. Features are extracted and analyzed so as to produce a matrix of optimum classifiers for the detection of SID usable and SID unusable speech segments. Optimum classifiers possess a minimum distance from a speaker model. A decision tree based upon fixed thresholds indicates the presence of a speech feature in a given speech segment. Following preprocessing, degraded speech is measured in one or more time, frequency, cepstral or SID usable / unusable domains. The results of the measurements are multiplied by a weighting factor whose value is proportional to the reliability of the corresponding time, frequency, or cepstral measurements performed. The measurements are fused as information, and usable speech segments are extracted for further processing. Such further processing of co-channel speech may include speaker identification where a segment-by-segment decision is made on each usable speech segment to determine whether they correspond to speaker #1 or speaker #2. Further processing of co-channel speech may also include constructing the complete utterance of speaker #1 or speaker #2. Speech features such as pitch and formants may be extended back into the unusable segments to form a complete utterance from each speaker.

A procedure to automatically evaluate the spoken fluency of a speaker by prompting the speaker to talk on a given topic, recording the speaker's speech to get a recorded sample of speech, and then analyzing the patterns of disfluencies in the speech to compute a numerical score to quantify the spoken fluency skills of the speakers. The numerical fluency score accounts for various prosodic and lexical features, including formant-based filled-pause detection, closely-occurring exact and inexact repeat N-grams, normalized average distance between consecutive occurrences of N-grams. The lexical features and prosodic features are combined to classify the speaker with a C-class classification and develop a rating for the speaker.

A resonator method and system for distinguishing characteristics of surface features or contaminants provides improved inspection or surface feature detection capability in scanning optical systems. A resonator including a surface of interest in the resonant path is coupled to a detector that detects light leaving the resonator. Changes in the resonance peak positions and peak intensities are evaluated against known changes for standard scatters in order to determine the material characteristics of an artifact at the surface of interest that causes a resonance change. The lateral size of the artifact is determined by de-convolving a known illumination spot size with the changing resonance characteristics, and the standard scatterer data is selected in conformity with the determined artifact size. The differential analysis using resonance peak shifts corresponding to phase and amplitude information provides an identification algorithm that identifies at least one artifact / material type is identified from matching known behaviors of artifacts / materials.

A method and detector for providing a noise resistant utterance detector is provided by extracting a noise estimate (15) to augment the signal-to-noise ratio of the speech signal, inverse filtering (17) of the speech signal to focus on the periodic excitation part of the signal and spectral reshaping (19) to accentuate separation between formants.