Authors:
O. Schleusing
1
;
R. Vetter
1
;
Ph. Renevey
1
;
J.-M. Vesin
2
and
V. Schweizer
3
Affiliations:
1
Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, Switzerland
;
2
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
;
3
University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland
Keyword(s):
Speech processing, Speech restoration, Adaptive filters, Laryngectomy.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Equipment
;
Biomedical Instruments and Devices
;
Embedded Signal Processing
;
Microelectronics
Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel device for the restoration of authentic characteristics in pathological speech uttered by subjects with laryngeal disorders. The device acquires and analyzes the original speech signal and reconstructs a speech signal with improved, healthy-like features in real-time. The pathological excitation is replaced by concatenation of randomly chosen healthy reference patterns. To restore authentic features, intervals between subsequent reference patterns are obtained through a multi-resolution approach. Short-term pitch variability is reproduced through a statistical variation model. Middle-term pitch variability exploits the correlation at the middle-term time scale between pitch and signal envelope. Long-term variability is obtained through adaptive wavetable oscillators; a novel, reliable and computationally efficient method. Performance was assessed with respect to two authentic features, namely breathiness and prosody. Preliminary results have shown that bre
athiness of the restored signal is clearly reduced, while prosody related features are slightly improved.
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