Oscillations, Waves, and Interactions - GWDG

Oscillations, Waves and Interactions, pp. 25–36
edited by T. Kurz, U. Parlitz, and U. Kaatze
Universitätsverlag Göttingen (2007) ISBN 978–3–938616–96–3
urn:nbn:de:gbv:7-verlag-1-02-4
Speech research with physical methods
Hans Werner Strube
Drittes Physikalisches Institut, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
Abstract. An overview of some recent work in speech research at the Dritte Physikalische
Institut is given, especially of investigations from a cooperation between physics and phoniatrics
that concern the analysis of pathologic voices by acoustic and optical means. The
main novel points are the extension of our own previously published acoustic methods to
running speech and new high-speed video methods.
1 Overview
Recent work at the Dritte Physikalische Institut may be divided in two thematic
fields:
• Work related to speech recognition.
• Acoustic analysis of pathologic voices, extended to running speech.
Here only the second thematic field, which was carried out as a cooperative project
of Prof. Eberhard Kruse (Department of Phoniatrics and Paedaudiology, University
of Göttingen) and our group, will be described in more detail.
2 Work related to speech recognition
This research concerned, on one hand, methods appropriate for preprocessing in
speech recognition, such as novel approaches to noise reduction, employing filtering
in the modulation-frequency domain [1,2], and to speaker normalization, starting
from acoustic estimation of speaker-specific measures of the vocal tract [3]. On the
other hand, there were recent investigations concerning speech recognition itself: first,
Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based recognition for “endless” signals with continuous
forming of hypothesis graphs [4,5] and noise-robust speech/nonspeech distinction
based on modulation filtering [6] (partially carried out at DaimlerChrysler); second,
exploitation of prosodic features (measures of pitch and loudness) to improve semantic
recognition in the context of a natural speech dialog platform [7,8] (partially done
at Bosch GmbH).