Voice/Non-Voice Classification Using Reliable Fundamental Frequency Estimator for Voice Activated Powered Wheelchair Control

  • Authors:

  • Soo-Young Suk;Hyun-Yeol Chung;Hiroaki Kojima

  • Affiliations:

  • Information Technology Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST Tsukuba Central 2, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568, Japan;School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Yeungnam University 214-1, Daedong, Gyungsan, Gyungbuk, 712-749, Korea;Information Technology Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST Tsukuba Central 2, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ICESS '07 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded Software and Systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a non-voice rejection method to perform Voice/Non-Voice (V/NV) classification using a fundamental frequency (F0) estimator called YIN. Although current speech recognition technology has achieved high performance, it is insufficient for some applications where high reliability is required, such as voice control of powered wheelchairs for disabled persons. The V/NV classification algorithm, which rejects non-voice input in Voice Activity Detection (VAD), is helpful for realizing a highly reliable system. The proposed V/NV classification adopts the ratio of a reliable F0contour to the whole input interval. To evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we used 1567 voice commands and 447 noises in powered wheelchair control in a real environment. These results indicate that the recall rate is 97% when the lowest threshold is selected for noise classification with 99% precision in VAD.