Speech Enhancement, Modeling and Recognition

Communication via speech is one of the essential functions of human beings. Humans possess varied ways to retrieve information from the outside world or to communicate with each other and the three most important sources of information are speech, images and written text. For many purposes, speech stands out as the most efficient and convenient one. Speech not only conveys linguistic contents, but also communicates other useful information like the mood of the speaker. When speaker and listener are near to each other in a quiet environment, communication is generally easy and accurate. However, at a distance or in a noisy background, the listeners ability to understand suffers. Speech enhancement aims to improve speech quality by using various algorithms. The objective of enhancement is improvement in intelligibility and/or overall perceptual quality of degraded speech signal using audio signal processing techniques. Enhancing of speech degraded by noise, or noise reduction, is the most important field of speech enhancement, and used for many applications such as mobile phones, VoIP, teleconferencing systems, speech recognition, and hearing aids. This book covers important fields in speech processing such as speech enhancement, noise cancellation, multi-resolution spectral analysis, voice conversion, speech recognition and emotion recognition from speech in addition to applications. This book will be of immense useful for advanced graduate students, researchers and practicing engineers employed in speech processing.