34,064 research outputs found
Audiovisual speech processing in visual speech noise
No full textWhen the talker’s face (visual speech) can be seen, speech perception is both facilitated (for congruent visual speech) and interfered with (for incongruent visual speech). The current study investigated whether the degree of these visual speech effects was affected by the presence of an additional irrelevant talking face. In the experiment, auditory speech targets (vCv syllables) were presented in noise for subsequent speech identification. Participants were presented with the full display or upper-half (control) display of a talker’s face uttering single syllables either in central vision (Exp 1) or in the visual periphery (Exp 2). In addition, another talker was presented (silently uttering a sentence) either in the periphery (Exp 1) or in central vision (Exp 2). Participants’ eye-movements were monitored to ensure that participants always fixated centrally. Congruent AV speech facilitation and incongruent McGurk effects were tested by comparing percent correct syllable identification for full face visual speech stimuli compared to upper-face only conditions. The results showed more accurate identification for congruent stimuli and less accurate responses for incongruent ones (full face condition vs. the upper-half face control). The magnitude of the McGurk effect was greater when the face articulating the syllable was presented in central vision (with visual speech noise in the periphery) than when it was presented in the periphery (with central visual speech noise). The size of the congruent AV speech effect, however, did not differ as a function of central or peripheral presentation
Budget Speech for FY 2007/2008
No full textBudget SpeechA Speech delivered to the National assembly on 14h June, 2007, by Hon. Amos Kimunya, EGH, M.P., Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Republic of Kenya when presenting the budget for fiscal year 2007/2008. The areas of focus were made on the following subjects: Achievements under the economic recovery strategy (2003- 2007), Reforms in governance, Laying the foundation for achieving Vision 2030, Financial projections for 2007/08 and Taxation proposals
Speech-Augmented Cone-of-Vision for Exploratory Data Analysis
No full textSpeech-Augmented Cone-of-Vision for Exploratory Data Analysi
Speech by H.E. President Daniel T. Arap Moi, C.G.H., M.P., on the Occasion of Kenyatta Day, 20th October, 1984
No full textA speech by H.E. President Daniel T. Arap Moi, on the Occasion of Kenyatta Day, 20th October, 1984.We are assembled here today to observe a special national day,
which we have set aside, each year, to remind ourselves of the long
and bitter struggle for freedom which culminated in the arrest of
our late founding father of the Kenya nation, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta,
thirty-two years ago. While we pay tribute to those who fought
for so long and sacrificed so much for the independence of our
country, let us on this occasion also pose and reflect on the vision
which inspired the struggle for uhuru. As Mzee Jomo Kenyatta always reminded us, our freedom was not handed to us on a silver platter. It took determined perseverance
and unshakable unity of purpose to win back our freedom and
human dignity. We therefore must not forget that the same unity
must continue to be the cornerstone in consolidating our nationhood..
Awareness and use of assistive technology among older adults with vision impairments in the Midwestern United States
No full textPlan BOlder adults with vision impairments make up more than 18% of the population of the United States (Boswell, 2000; Braille Institute, 2000). If these trends continue an estimated 13 million older adults are likely to be affected by a visual impairment or blindness in the next 20 to 30 years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2002) and the Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics (2000), there are significantly higher proportions of older adults in certain states around the country. States with the highest numbers of older adults who experience a visual impairment are centered within the Midwestern region of the United States (National Eye Institute, 2002). Older adults who are visually impaired find it increasingly difficult to perform daily living activities and remaining independent. The use of assistive technology may play a significant role in the lives of older adults who are visually impaired or blind. Current research however, indicates that most older adults with disabilities, including those with vision loss are unaware of the availability of devices to improve their independent functioning (Russell, 1997; Campell, 1999; Gitlin, 2002). At the same time, studies suggest that maintaining independence is one of greatest concerns among older adults (Mack, 1997). Additionally, research has shown that older adults with vision impairments have a 15% higher probability of being admitted to a nursing home than other older adults (Moore, 1994). There is a need to examine the level of awareness and use of adaptive devices among older adults who are visually impaired or blind, and of the possible effects assistive technology may have on their quality of life. The current study examined the level of awareness and frequency of use of assistive technology devices among older persons with visual impairments in the Midwestern United States. Awareness and use of assistive technology was measured among 113 adults more than 55 years of age who were identified as experiencing a visual impairment, and who resided in the three states of Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. Information was gathered through the use of a survey designed by the primary researcher for this study. Additional areas of information gathered by the researcher included demographic information, medical and health issues, safety, timeliness of services, and available funding sources. Results suggest that older adults with visual impairments were not aware of assistive technology that is available to enhance general activities of daily living. Magnifiers and Close Circuit Televisions (CCTV) were the most commonly used forms of assistive technology among participants in the survey, which corresponds to the reported limitations of reading and writing. While no statistically significant findings were found, there were some important trends to consider. Overall, participants in the study were not concerned with safety or general medical and health needs. At the same time, a large number of survey respondents indicated that they had at least one disabling condition in addition to their visual loss. Many had two or more additional disabling conditions. Deafness and cardiovascular disease were found to be the top two secondary health conditions. Perhaps the most distressing results related to the lack of available funding to support assistive technology purchases. The vast majority (87.6%) of respondents choose “self-pay” as their primary funding source for assistive technology. Results suggest the need for increased education about available technology to enhance daily living skills as well as identification of funding sources to support technology for older adults with visual impairments
Two and three-dimensional visual articulatory models for pronunciation training and for treatment of speech disorders
No full textVisual articulatory models can be used for visualizing vocal tract articulatory speech movements. This information may be helpful in pronunciation training or in therapy of speech disorders. For testing this hypothesis, speech recognition rates were quantified for mute animations of vocalic and consonantal speech movements generated by a 2D and a 3D visual articulatory model. The visually based speech sound recognition test (mimicry test) was performed by two groups of eight children (five to eight years old) matched in age and sex. The children were asked to mimic the visually produced mute speech movement animations for different speech sounds. Recognition rates stay significantly above chance but indicate no significant difference for each of the two models. Children older than 5 years are capable of interpreting vocal tract articulatory speech sound movements without any preparatory training in a speech adequate way. The complex 3D-display of vocal tract articulatory movements provides no significant advantage in comparison to the visually simpler 2D-midsagittal displays of vocal tract articulatory movements
Sparseness and speech perception in noise
No full textCan we model speech recognition in noise by exploring higher order statistics of the combined signal? How will changes in these statistics affect speech perception in noise? This study addresses these questions in two experiments. One investigated the relationship between an established "glimpsing" model and the fourth order statistic, kurtosis. The glimpsing model [1] proposes that listeners can explore the local speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) in short time segments (glimpses) and focus on areas where SNR is high. Results showed that there is a very high correlation between percentages of glimpsing area and kurtosis (r = 0.99;p < 0.01), suggesting that kurtosis can serve as a simpler index for measuring glimpsing. The experiment also examined the association between kurtosis and recognition of nonsense words (vowel-consonant-vowel, VCV) in babble modulated noise, also showing very high correlation (r = 0.97;p < 0.01). Another separate study focused on the relationship of sparseness to speech recognition score for VCV words in natural babble noise made of 100 people talking simultaneously [2]. Results show that there is also high correlation between kurtosis and speech recognition score with this noise. Logistic regression analysis to obtain the kurtosis for 50% correct showed this was achieved at a kurtosis of approximately 1.
Audio-Visual Speech Recognition in MISP2021 Challenge: Dataset Release and Deep Analysis
No full textIn this paper, we present the updated Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) corpus of MISP2021 challenge, a large-scale audio-visual Chinese conversational corpus consisting of 141h audio and video data collected by far/middle/near microphones and far/middle cameras in 34 real-home TV rooms. To our best knowledge, our corpus is the first distant multi-microphone conversational Chinese audio-visual corpus and the first large vocabulary continuous Chinese lip-reading dataset in the adverse home-tv scenario. Moreover, we make a deep analysis of the corpus and conduct a comprehensive ablation study of all audio and video data in the audio-only/video-only/audiovisual systems. Error analysis shows video modality supplement acoustic information degraded by noise to reduce deletion errors and provide discriminative information in overlapping speech to reduce substitution errors. Finally, we also design a set of experiments such as frontend, data augmentation and end-to-end models for providing the direction of potential future work. The corpus and the code are released to promote the research not only in speech area but also for the computer vision area and cross-disciplinary research.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Multimedia Computin
Advanced Speech Communication System for Deaf People
No full textThis paper describes the development of an Advanced Speech Communication System for Deaf People and its field evaluation in a real application domain: the renewal of Driver’s License. The system is composed of two modules. The first one is a Spanish into Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española) translation module made up of a speech recognizer, a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). The second module is a Spoken Spanish generator from sign writing composed of a visual interface (for specifying a sequence of signs), a language translator (for generating the sequence of words in Spanish), and finally, a text to speech converter. For language translation, the system integrates three technologies: an example based strategy, a rule based translation method and a statistical translator. This paper also includes a detailed description of the evaluation carried out in the Local Traffic Office in the city of Toledo (Spain) involving real government employees and deaf people. This evaluation includes objective measurements from the system and subjective information from questionnaire
Visual Speech in Technology-Enhanced Learning
No full textThis thesis investigates the use of synthetic talking heads, with lip, tongue and face movements synchronized with synthesized or natural speech, in technology-enhanced learning. This work applies talking heads in a speech tutoring application for teaching English as a second language. Previous studies have shown that speech perception is aided by visual information, but more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of visualization of articulators in pronunciation training. This thesis explores whether or not visual speech technology can give an improvement in learning pronunciation.
This thesis investigates techniques for audiovisual speech synthesis, using both viseme-based and data-driven approaches to implement multiple talking heads. Intelligibility studies found the audiovisual heads to be more intelligible than audio alone, and the data-driven head was found to be more intelligible than the viseme-driven implementation.
The talking heads are applied in a pronunciation-training application, which is evaluated by second-language learners to investigate the benefit of visual speech in technology-enhanced learning. User trials explored the efficacy of the software in demonstrating the /b/–/p/ contrast in English. The results indicate that learners showed an improvement in listening and pronunciation after using the software, while the benefit of visualization compared to auditory training alone varied between individuals. User evaluations found that the talking heads were perceived to be helpful in learning pronunciation, and the positive feedback on the tutoring system suggests that the use of talking heads in technology-enhanced learning could be useful in addition to traditional methods
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