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Mapping Speech Spectra from Throat Microphone to Close-Speaking Microphone: A Neural Network Approach

Abstract

Speech recorded from a throat microphone is robust to the surrounding noise, but sounds unnatural unlike the speech recorded from a close-speaking microphone. This paper addresses the issue of improving the perceptual quality of the throat microphone speech by mapping the speech spectra from the throat microphone to the close-speaking microphone. A neural network model is used to capture the speaker-dependent functional relationship between the feature vectors (cepstral coefficients) of the two speech signals. A method is proposed to ensure the stability of the all-pole synthesis filter. Objective evaluations indicate the effectiveness of the proposed mapping scheme. The advantage of this method is that the model gives a smooth estimate of the spectra of the close-speaking microphone speech. No distortions are perceived in the reconstructed speech. This mapping technique is also used for bandwidth extension of telephone speech.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://doi.org/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Shahina, A., Yegnanarayana, B. Mapping Speech Spectra from Throat Microphone to Close-Speaking Microphone: A Neural Network Approach. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2007, 087219 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/87219

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