K. Sreenivasa Rao - Böcker

Predicting Prosody from Text for Text-to-Speech Synthesis covers the specific aspects of prosody, mainly focusing on how to predict the prosodic information from linguistic text, and then how to exploit the predicted prosodic knowledge for various speech applications. Author K. Sreenivasa Rao discusses proposed methods along with state-of-the-art techniques for the acquisition and incorporation of prosodic knowledge for developing speech systems. Positional, contextual and phonological features are proposed for representing the linguistic and production constraints of the sound units present in the text. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers working in the area of speech processing.

“Emotion Recognition Using Speech Features” provides coverage of emotion-specific features present in speech. The author also discusses suitable models for capturing emotion-specific information for distinguishing different emotions.  The content of this book is important for designing and developing  natural and sophisticated speech systems. In this Brief, Drs. Rao and Koolagudi lead a discussion of how emotion-specific information is embedded in speech and how to acquire emotion-specific knowledge using appropriate statistical models. Additionally, the authors provide information about exploiting multiple evidences derived from various features and models. The acquired emotion-specific knowledge is useful for synthesizing emotions. Features includes discussion of:• Global and local prosodic features at syllable, word and phrase levels, helpful for capturing emotion-discriminative information; • Exploiting complementary evidences obtained from excitation sources, vocal tract systems and prosodic features in order to enhance the emotion recognition performance; • Proposed multi-stage and hybrid models for improving the emotion recognition performance. This brief is for researchers working in areas related to speech-based products such as mobile phone manufacturing companies, automobile companies, and entertainment products as well as researchers involved in basic and applied speech processing research.

In this brief, the authors discuss recently explored spectral (sub-segmental and pitch synchronous) and prosodic (global and local features at word and syllable levels in different parts of the utterance) features for discerning emotions in a robust manner.The authors also delve into the complementary evidences obtained from excitation source, vocal tract system and prosodic features for the purpose of enhancing emotion recognition performance. Features based on speaking rate characteristics are explored with the help of multi-stage and hybrid models for further improving emotion recognition performance. Proposed spectral and prosodic features are evaluated on real life emotional speech corpus.

This book presents a statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) framework for developing a speech synthesis system where the desired speech is generated from the parameters of vocal tract and excitation source. Throughout the book, the authors discuss novel source modeling techniques to enhance the naturalness and overall intelligibility of the SPSS system. This book provides several important methods and models for generating the excitation source parameters for enhancing the overall quality of synthesized speech. The contents of the book are useful for both researchers and system developers. For researchers, the book is useful for knowing the current state-of-the-art excitation source models for SPSS and further refining the source models to incorporate the realistic semantics present in the text. For system developers, the book is useful to integrate the sophisticated excitation source models mentioned to the latest models of mobile/smart phones.

This book focuses on speech processing in the presence of low-bit rate coding and varying background environments. Accurate estimation of these crucial events will be useful for carrying out various speech tasks such as speech recognition, speaker recognition and speech rate modification in mobile environments.

This book discusses speaker recognition methods to deal with realistic variable noisy environments. The text covers authentication systems for; robust noisy background environments, functions in real time and incorporated in mobile devices. The book focuses on different approaches to enhance the accuracy of speaker recognition in presence of varying background environments. The authors examine: (a) Feature compensation using multiple background models, (b) Feature mapping using data-driven stochastic models, (c) Design of super vector- based GMM-SVM framework for robust speaker recognition, (d) Total variability modeling (i-vectors) in a discriminative framework and (e) Boosting method to fuse evidences from multiple SVM models.

This book discusses the impact of spectral features extracted from frame level, glottal closure regions, and pitch-synchronous analysis on the performance of language identification systems. In addition to spectral features, the authors explore prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and stress features for discriminating the languages. They present how the proposed spectral and prosodic features capture the language specific information from two complementary aspects, showing how the development of language identification (LID) system using the combination of spectral and prosodic features will enhance the accuracy of identification as well as improve the robustness of the system. This book provides the methods to extract the spectral and prosodic features at various levels, and also suggests the appropriate models for developing robust LID systems according to specific spectral and prosodic features. Finally, the book discuss about various combinations of spectral and prosodic features, and the desired models to enhance the performance of LID systems.

The book discusses how in implicit processing approach, excitation source features are derived from LP residual, Hilbert envelope (magnitude) of LP residual and Phase of LP residual;