Publication

Observations on Multi-Band Asynchrony in Distant Speech Recordings

Guillaume Lathoud
2006
Report or working paper
Abstract

Whenever the speech signal is captured by a microphone distant from the user, the acoustic response of the room introduces significant distortions. To remove these distortions from the signal, solutions exist that greatly improve the ASR performance (what was said?), such as dereverberation or beamforming. It may seem natural to apply those signal-level methods in the context of speaker clustering (who spoke when?) with distant microphones, for example when annotating a meeting recording for enhanced browsing experience. Unfortunately, on a corpus of real meeting recordings, it appeared that neither dereverberation nor beamforming gave any improvement on the speaker clustering task. The present technical report constitutes a first attempt to explain this failure, through a cross-correlation analysis between close-talking and distant microphone signals. The various frequency bands of the speech spectrum appear to become desynchronized when the speaker is 1 or 2 meters away from the microphone. Further directions of research are suggested to model this desynchronization.

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In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing includes audio, video, speech, , sonar, and radar as examples of signals. A signal may also be defined as observable change in a quantity over space or time (a time series), even if it does not carry information.
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In signal processing, distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of a signal. In communications and electronics it means the alteration of the waveform of an information-bearing signal, such as an audio signal representing sound or a video signal representing images, in an electronic device or communication channel. Distortion is usually unwanted, and so engineers strive to eliminate or minimize it. In some situations, however, distortion may be desirable.
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