JP2007079072A - Method and device for speech recognition - Google Patents

Abstract

<P>PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a method and a device for speech recognition that exclude a feature quantity of a speech area which becomes a long sound and perform speech recognition based upon an ARHMM. <P>SOLUTION: The method for speech recognition comprises procedures of judging a section wherein phonetic variation of an input speech is small as a long-sound section, deleting the speech feature quantity of the section, and recognizing remaining feature quantities. The device for speech recognition comprises a means of implementing the procedures. <P>COPYRIGHT: (C)2007,JPO&INPIT

Description

  The present invention relates to a speech recognition method and speech recognition apparatus for speech including high fundamental frequency speech and prolonged sound.

Recent speech recognition technology has made it possible to recognize continuous speech of a large vocabulary with high accuracy, but its application range is very limited.
For example, speech recognition in a noisy environment with background noise or reverberation, speech recognition in various utterance styles such as dialogue speech, emotional speech, singing voice, etc., and various speakers such as children, elderly people, and disabled people In speech recognition, the recognition accuracy is significantly degraded.

When recognizing voices including high fundamental frequency voices and longer voices, such as voices of singing voices, children's voices, and voice actors such as anime (for example, modeling of acoustic signals using ARHMM and parameter estimation methods are described below) Patent Document 1, Patent Document 2, and Patent Document 3, and the following Non-Patent Document 1, Non-Patent Document 2, Non-Patent Document 3, etc.)) Conventional speech recognition methods for the following reasons Then, recognition becomes difficult.
In other words, high fundamental frequency speech has a sparse harmonic structure in the frequency domain. Therefore, LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) cepstrum (logarithmic spectrum obtained by inverse Fourier transform), which has been widely used as speech features, has been widely used. And MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient: a feature quantity representing a spectral envelope extracted from speech in consideration of a human sensory scale) has a problem that a formant feature representing phonology cannot be accurately extracted. In a conventional HMM-based recognition system that performs recognition using an acoustic model based on HMM (Hidden Markov Model) learned from speech read out from newspaper articles, etc., the duration of the prolonged speech and the state transition probability of HMM are mismatched. Thus, there is a problem that recognition accuracy deteriorates.

JP 2003-5785 A JP 2003-99085 A JP 2004-287010 A Satoshi Sasou, Kazuyo Tanaka, “Modeling of sound source by HMM and extraction of vocal tract characteristics robust to high fundamental frequency,” IEICE Transactions (D-II), Vol. J84-D-II, no. 9, pp. 1960-1969, Sep, 2001. Akira Sasou, Masataka Goto, Satoru Hayamizu, Kazuyo Tanaka, “Comparison of Auto-Regressive, Non-Stationary Excited Signal Parametric. of IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2004), pp. 295-304, Sep. 2004. Akira Sasou, Masataka Goto, Sataru Hayamizu, Kazuyo Tanaka, “An Auto-Regressive and Non-Steady Excited Signal Para Estimator. of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2005), vol. 1, pp. 237-240, Mar. 2005.

  In view of the above problems, an object of the present invention is to provide a speech recognition method and a speech recognition apparatus for obtaining a speech feature amount by a speech analysis method based on ARHMM, and for recognizing speech by removing a speech feature amount having a longer sound length. There is to do.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a speech recognition apparatus configured to execute the speech recognition method of the present invention.
In order to solve the above-described problems, the present invention passes the output of an ARHMM (Auto-Regressive Hidden Markov Model: Autoregressive Hidden Markov Model: HMM (Hidden Markov Model) shown in FIG. 1 through an AR (autoregressive) filter. Configuration → The time series obtained by inversely filtering the observation time series with the AR filter is expressed by the HMM: In other words, since the output of the HMM is passed through the AR filter, the observation time series is expressed by continuously changing statistics. In other words, if the observed time series changes with a constant correlation, the correlation may be converted to a simple time series by removing the correlation with an AR filter. A speech feature extraction unit based on ARHMM for executing a speech feature extraction procedure based on the A speech recognition method comprising a combination of a long sound correction processing means to perform and a speech recognition means for executing a speech recognition procedure in sequence, and a speech recognition apparatus comprising each means for executing the method are used.
The present invention employs an analysis method based on ARHMM to extract features from high fundamental frequency speech such as singing voice.
For problematic long sounds, the section with little phonological variation of the input speech is judged as a long sound section, the speech feature amount in that section is deleted, and the remaining feature amount is recognized, so that the recognition accuracy deteriorates due to the long sound. To improve. In the proposed method, a Δ coefficient obtained as a regression coefficient in the time axis direction with respect to the time series signal of the audio feature amount is obtained by the following equation (9).
Δc (n, i) represents the Δ coefficient of the i-th element of the audio feature quantity at frame time n. The Δ coefficient obtained in this way is used to detect a long sound by utilizing the fact that it approaches zero in a long sound section with little phonological variation. The specific procedure is as follows. First, a time series s (n) of the square sum of Δ coefficients is obtained from the following equation (10).

Next, for example, a time series l (n) obtained by performing a smoothing process such as a moving average on s (n) is obtained from the following equation (11).
For the time series l (n) obtained as described above, a threshold value l _thr is provided, and when N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s fall below the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (12)
It is determined that the sound is a long sound, and the feature value at that time is deleted as long as l (n) continues to fall below the threshold from the time (n _s + N _r ).

Specifically, the following means are adopted.
(1) The speech recognition method is characterized in that a section with a small phonological variation of the input speech is determined as a long sound section, the speech feature amount in that section is deleted, and the remaining feature amount is recognized.
(2) In the speech recognition method described in (1) above, a Δ coefficient is obtained from a speech feature value obtained from a frame at each time in a long sound section of the input speech, and the square sum of the Δ coefficient of each frame is calculated as the time of the frame. Performs smoothing processing on the time series arranged in order, further sets a threshold value, and if the number of frames that continuously fall below the threshold value exceeds a certain number, it is determined as a long sound section as long as it continues below the threshold value in subsequent frames And a feature of deleting the feature amount of the frame and recognizing the remaining features.

(3) In the speech recognition method described in (1) or (2) above, the procedure of (1) or (2) is applied to a speech feature obtained by speech analysis based on Auto-Regressive Hidden Markov Model. It is characterized by doing.
(4) The speech recognition method described in (3) above is
(4-1) An audio signal is captured in units of frames every time, a time series signal of the audio signal is analyzed based on ARHMM, and the logarithmic value u (n) of the AR (autoregressive) spectrum amplitude at the obtained frame time n is obtained. ) Is obtained by the following equation (13),
Where N is the number of FFT samples.
(4-2) Procedure 2 for obtaining the Mel filter bank output using the triangular windows arranged on the Mel frequency,

(4-3) Discrete cosine transformation is performed on the logarithmic value u (n) obtained in step 1 and the mel filter bank output obtained in step 2 to obtain an ARHMM-based MFCC A feature amount representing a spectral envelope extracted from step 3),
(4-4) Procedure 4 for obtaining a time series s (n) of the square sum of Δ coefficients at frame time n from the following equation (14):
(4-5) Next, a procedure 5 for obtaining a time series l (n) obtained by performing a smoothing process such as a moving average on s (n) from the following equation (15):

(4-6) A threshold value l _thr is provided for the time series l (n) obtained as described above, and N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s are expressed as the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (16). Below
Procedure 6 for determining a long sound and obtaining a signal from which the feature value at that time is deleted as long as l (n) continues to fall below the threshold from the time (n _s + N _r ),
(4-7) Procedure 7 for performing speech recognition based on the feature amount obtained by executing the procedure 6 above,
It is characterized by performing.

(5) The speech recognition apparatus is characterized in that a section with a small phonological variation of the input speech is determined as a long sound section, a speech feature amount in the section is deleted, and the remaining feature amount is recognized.
(6) The speech recognition apparatus according to (5) described above obtains a Δ coefficient from a speech feature amount obtained from a frame at each time in a long sound section of the input speech, and calculates a square sum of the Δ coefficient of each frame as a frame time. Performs smoothing processing on the time series arranged in order, further sets a threshold value, and if the number of frames that continuously fall below the threshold value exceeds a certain number, it is determined as a long sound section as long as it continues below the threshold value in subsequent frames And a means for deleting the feature amount of the frame and recognizing the remaining features.
(7) The speech recognition apparatus according to the above (5) or (6) applies the means according to claim 5 or 6 to a speech feature obtained by speech analysis based on Auto-Regressive Hidden Markov Model. Features.

(8) The speech recognition device according to (7) above,
(8-1) An audio signal is captured in units of frames every time, a time series signal of the audio signal is analyzed based on ARHMM, and the logarithmic value u (n) of the AR (autoregressive) spectrum amplitude at the obtained frame time n is obtained. ) By means of the following equation 17,
Where N is the number of FFT samples.
(8-2) Means 2 for obtaining the mel filter bank output using triangular windows arranged on the mel frequency,
(8-3) Means 3 for performing discrete cosine transform on the logarithmic value u (n) obtained by means 1 and the mel filter bank output obtained by means 2 to obtain an ARHMM-based MFCC,
(8-4) Means 4 for obtaining a time series s (n) of square sums of Δ coefficients at frame time n from the following equation (18):

(8-5) Next, means 5 for obtaining a time series l (n) obtained by subjecting s (n) to a smoothing process such as a moving average from the following equation (19),
(8-6) A threshold value l _thr is provided for the time series l (n) obtained as described above, and N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s are expressed as the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (20). Below
Means 6 for determining a long sound and obtaining a signal from which the characteristic quantity at that time is deleted as long as l (n) continues to fall below the threshold from the time (n _s + N _r );
(8-7) Means 7 for performing speech recognition based on the feature value that is the output of the means 6;
It is characterized by comprising.

Since the conventional speech recognition system uses, for example, an acoustic model learned from the speech of reading a newspaper article, a mismatch occurs particularly with respect to state transition probabilities in speech that includes many prolonged sounds such as a singing voice. Also, the linear prediction method and the mel filter bank analysis, which are conventional feature extraction methods for phonemes, tend to deteriorate the extraction accuracy when analyzing high fundamental frequency speech. For this reason, a mismatch occurs with the acoustic model regarding the phoneme information. For these reasons, when a voice such as a singing voice is recognized by a conventional voice recognition system, the recognition accuracy is remarkably deteriorated.
In order to solve this problem, the present invention eliminates the mismatch of state transition probabilities by detecting and deleting a long sound section. In order to accurately detect a long sound section, it is necessary to correctly extract phonological features even from a voice having a high fundamental frequency such as a singing voice. However, as described above, the conventional feature extraction method deteriorates in accuracy in the case of high fundamental frequency speech. For this reason, the detection accuracy of the long sound section is also deteriorated, and there is a possibility that the mismatch related to the state transition probability is not eliminated. The present invention improves the accuracy of phonological feature extraction and the detection of the long sound interval at the same time by combining the ARHMM-based method, which has already been developed and enables accurate phonological feature extraction even from high fundamental frequency speech, and the long sound correction processing. And high recognition accuracy can be realized.

  Embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the drawings.

As shown in FIG. 1, the speech recognition apparatus is configured to execute the speech recognition method of the present invention.
The speech recognition device basically has an input / output (I / O) device, a storage device (memory), a central processing unit, etc. that captures at least a speech signal and outputs a predetermined computation result, A predetermined procedure is executed. The voice recognition device is composed of, for example, a personal computer. In this case, a device for capturing an audio signal may be provided.
A singing voice recognition experiment using the speech recognition method of the present invention will be described below.
In the experiment, 12 songs with little English expression were selected from the popular Japanese music recorded in the RWC research music database, and the vocal files (data only for vocals not including instrumental performance) were used. The sampling frequency is 16 kHz. For recognition, a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system Julius and an acoustic model learned from speech obtained by reading Japanese newspaper articles were used. The feature amount used for learning the acoustic model is MFCC (a feature amount representing a spectral envelope extracted from speech in consideration of a human sensory scale). As described above, the acoustic model of the recognition system used in this experiment is completely open with respect to singing voice. The word dictionary and language model were generated from the lyrics for each song.
In this experiment, the ARHMM-based MFCC is obtained from the AR coefficient a (i) by the following procedure.

This will be described with reference to a flowchart.
Introduction (START),
(1) An audio signal is captured in units of frames every time, a time series signal of the audio signal is analyzed based on ARHMM, and a logarithmic value u (n) of the AR (autoregressive) spectrum amplitude at the obtained frame time n is obtained. It calculates | requires by the following formula | equation 21 (step S1).
This process corresponds to a process for obtaining a logarithmic amplitude of FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) in a procedure for obtaining an ordinary MFCC. Where N is the number of FFT samples. The procedure after this is the same as that of normal MFCC.
(2) Obtain the mel filter bank output using the triangular windows arranged on the mel frequency (step S2),
(3) Discrete cosine transform is performed on the logarithmic value u (n) obtained in step 1 and the mel filter bank output obtained in step 2 to obtain an ARHMM-based MFCC (step S3).
Next, a regression analysis is performed along the time axis direction of the ARHMM-based MFCC obtained as described above to obtain a Δ coefficient. The long sound section is detected from the Δ coefficient using the following formulas (5), (6), and (7).
For long sounds, the section with little phonological variation of the input speech is judged as a long sound section, the speech feature amount in that section is deleted, and the remaining feature amount is recognized, thereby improving the recognition accuracy degradation due to the long sound. . The proposed method detects a long sound by utilizing the fact that a Δ coefficient obtained as a regression coefficient in the time axis direction for a time series signal of speech feature values approaches zero in a long sound section with little phonological variation.

In particular,
(5) Next, a time series l (n) obtained by performing a smoothing process such as a moving average on s (n) is obtained from the following equation (23) (step S5).

(6) A threshold value l _thr is provided for the time series l (n) obtained as described above, and N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s fall below the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (24). Once
Determines that the prolonged sound, time _{(n s + N r) l} (n) from obtaining a signal which removes the feature quantity of that time as long as that continues below the threshold (step S6).
(7) Voice recognition is performed based on the feature amount obtained by executing step 6 (step S7).
End (END).

Steps S1 to S3 correspond to feature extraction procedure SA or feature extraction means MA based on ARHMM in FIG. 1, and steps S4 to S6 correspond to long sound correction processing procedure SB or long sound correction processing means MB in FIG. The step S7 corresponds to the voice recognition procedure SC or the voice recognition means MC shown in FIG.
FIG. 2 shows an example in which long sound section detection is performed.
FIG. 2 is an output signal diagram of each part of the speech recognition apparatus of the present invention. From the top, singing voice waveform (a), phonological feature extraction result (b), the result of applying Equation 11 to the delta feature quantity of ARHMM-based MFCC (c), and the bottom figure is given by Equation 12 The section information (d) of the frame from which the evaluated feature value is deleted is shown. As shown in this figure, according to the present invention, it is understood that the feature amount is correctly deleted in the section where the phoneme is constant. The vertical axis in FIG. 2C is a range from 0 to 40 in one memory 5.
Tables 1 and 2 show the results when the singing voice is recognized by each of the ARHMM-based MFCC and the conventional MFCC as the voice feature amount without performing the long sound correction process. Table 1 shows the correct word rate (correct word rate [%]), and Table 2 shows the error rate (error rate [%]). Looking at the average of the word correct rate and the error rate, the recognition rate is improved when the ARHMM-based MFCC is used as the feature amount, compared to the conventional MFCC.

Next, Tables 3 and 4 show the results of performing long sound correction processing on the ARHMM-based MFCC extracted from the singing voice and the conventional MFCC and recognizing the obtained feature values. Thus, the recognition rate is improved more when the long sound correction processing is performed on the ARHMM-based MFCC than when the long sound correction processing is performed on the conventional MFCC.

The effectiveness of the long sound correction process can be confirmed by comparing the MFCC results without the long sound correction process (Tables 1 and 2) and with the long sound correction process (Tables 3 and 4). In addition, the results of the ARHMM-based MFCC without long sound correction processing (Tables 1 and 2) show little improvement, but the results of combining the ARHMM-based MFCC and long sound correction processing (ARHMM in Tables 3 and 4) Since both the phoneme feature extraction accuracy and the resulting long sound interval detection accuracy are improved, the improvement is greater than the sum of the improvement values obtained when used independently. From the above, it can be seen that there is an optimal combination of the ARHMM-based MFCC and the long sound correction processing.

Industrial applicability

A karaoke machine that recognizes the singing voice, detects which part of the song is being sung, and controls the accompaniment speed based on that information.
Recognize singing voices and animated voices to automate telop display of lyrics and lines.

It is a flowchart figure of the speech recognition method of this invention. It is an output signal diagram of each part of the speech recognition apparatus of the present invention.

Explanation of symbols

Feature extraction procedure SA and feature extraction means MA based on SA, MA ARHMM
SB, MB Long sound correction processing procedure SB and feature extraction means MB
SC, MC Voice recognition procedure SC and voice recognition means MC

Claims (8)

A speech recognition method characterized by determining a section having a small phonological variation of input speech as a long sound section, deleting a speech feature amount of the section, and recognizing the remaining feature amount. For a long sound section of the input speech, a Δ coefficient is obtained from the speech feature value obtained in the frame at each time, a smoothing process is performed on the time series in which the square sum of the Δ coefficient is arranged in the order of the frame time, and further a threshold value If the number of frames that continuously fall below the threshold exceeds a certain number, it is determined as a long sound section as long as it continues to fall below the threshold in the subsequent frames, the feature amount of that frame is deleted, and the remaining features are The speech recognition method according to claim 1, further comprising a recognition procedure. 3. The speech recognition method according to claim 1, wherein the procedure of claim 1 or 2 is applied to a speech feature obtained by speech analysis based on an autoregressive hidden Markov model. The speech recognition method according to claim 3,
(1) An audio signal is captured in units of frames every time, a time series signal of the audio signal is analyzed based on an autoregressive hidden Markov model, and a logarithmic value u of the AR (autoregressive) spectrum amplitude at the obtained frame time n is obtained. Procedure 1 for obtaining (n) by the following equation (1):
In the equation, N corresponds to the number of FFT samples.
(2) Procedure 2 for obtaining the Mel filter bank output using triangular windows arranged on the Mel frequency,
(3) Step 3 of performing discrete cosine transform on them to obtain an ARHMM-based MFCC;
(4) Procedure 4 for obtaining a time series s (n) of the square sum of Δ coefficients at frame time n from the following equation (2):
(5) Next, a procedure 5 for obtaining a time series l (n) obtained by subjecting s (n) to a smoothing process such as a moving average from the following equation (3):
(6) A threshold value l _thr is provided for the time series l (n) obtained as described above, and N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s fall below the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (4). Once
Procedure 6 for determining a long sound and obtaining a signal from which the feature value at that time is deleted as long as l (n) continues to fall below the threshold from the time (n _s + N _r ),
(7) Procedure 7 for performing speech recognition based on the feature value obtained by executing the procedure 6;
The voice recognition method characterized by performing. A speech recognition apparatus characterized by determining a section having a small phonological variation of input speech as a long sound section, deleting a speech feature amount of the section, and recognizing the remaining feature amount. Obtain a Δ coefficient from the speech feature value obtained from the frame at each time for the long sound section of the input speech, and perform a smoothing process on the time series in which the square sum of the Δ coefficient of each frame is arranged in the time order of the frame, In addition, when a threshold value is set and the number of frames that continuously fall below the threshold value exceeds a certain number, it is determined that the frame is a long sound section as long as it continues to fall below the threshold value, the feature amount of that frame is deleted, and the remaining frames 6. The speech recognition apparatus according to claim 5, further comprising means for recognizing the characteristics. 7. The speech recognition apparatus according to claim 5, wherein the means of claim 5 or 6 is applied to a speech feature obtained by speech analysis based on an autoregressive hidden Markov model. The speech recognition device according to claim 7,
(1) A speech signal is captured in units of frames for each time, a time series signal of the speech signal is analyzed based on an autoregressive hidden Markov model, and a logarithmic value u (n) of an autoregressive spectrum amplitude at the obtained frame time n Means 1 for obtaining the following equation (5):
Where N is the number of FFT samples.
(2) Means 2 for obtaining a mel filter bank output using triangular windows arranged on the mel frequency,
(3) Means 3 for performing discrete cosine transform on the logarithmic value u (n) obtained in step 1 and the mel filter bank output obtained in step 2 to obtain an autoregressive hidden Markov model-based MFCC;
(5) Next, means 5 for obtaining a time series l (n) obtained by subjecting s (n) to a smoothing process such as a moving average from the following equation (7):
(6) For the time series l (n) obtained as described above, a threshold value l _thr is provided, and N _r consecutive values from a certain time n _s fall below the threshold value l _{thr in} the following equation (8). Once
Means 6 for determining a long sound and obtaining a signal from which the characteristic quantity at that time is deleted as long as l (n) continues to fall below the threshold from the time (n _s + N _r );
(7) Procedure 7 for performing speech recognition based on the feature value that is the output of the means 6;
A speech recognition apparatus characterized by executing