Seminar on The Challenges of Pattern Recognition for Speech Signals

The Challenges of Pattern Recognition for Speech Signals Speaker: Dr. Douglas O’Shaughnessy Institution: University of Quebec Date: 23 September 2015 Time: 2:00PM Place: ICT 424C Abstract: Speech coding has found great success in today’s widespread usage of cell phones. In addition, people are increasingly accustomed to hearing and accepting synthetic voices when they access information by phone. A third major system used for speech, automatic speech recognition (ASR), is also seeing significant usage, but still has major limitations, falling far short of what human listeners can do. This talk will examine the modern techniques applied for recognition of the information present in speech: its textual content, the identity of the speaker, emotional state, and the language used. We will examine ways to extract relevant parameters, while ignoring channel distortions and extraneous sounds that may also be present in the signal. A brief history of ASR development will show the evolution of usage of Fourier analysis, linear prediction, cepstrum, and neural networks. The strengths and weaknesses of the modern approach to ASR that uses mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), hidden Markov Models (HMM), and language models will also be discussed. For further information contact: Dr. R. Rangayyan at ranga@ucalgary.ca or 403-220-6745 Supported by the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Location:
ICT 424C
Speaker:
Dr. Douglas O’Shaughnessy (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ph.D., 1976) has been professor at INRS (University of Quebec) and adjunct professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada since 1977. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (1992) and of the IEEE (2006). He is a Regional Director of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and a member of its Board of Governors. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing. He is Secretary of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), and Past Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Speech and Language Technical Committee. He has presented tutorials on speech recognition at ICASSP-1996, ICASSP-2001, at ICC-2003, and at ICASSP-2009. He is the author of the textbook Speech Communications: Human and Machine (1986 Addison-Wesley; revised 2000, IEEE Press).
More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/seminar-challenges-pattern-recognition-speech-signals