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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Time-Frequency Masking Performance For Improved Intelligibility With Microphone Arrays, Joshua P. Morgan
Time-Frequency Masking Performance For Improved Intelligibility With Microphone Arrays, Joshua P. Morgan
Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering
Time-Frequency (TF) masking is an audio processing technique useful for isolating an audio source from interfering sources. TF masking has been applied and studied in monaural and binaural applications, but has only recently been applied to distributed microphone arrays. This work focuses on evaluating the TF masking technique's ability to isolate human speech and improve speech intelligibility in an immersive "cocktail party" environment. In particular, an upper-bound on TF masking performance is established and compared to the traditional delay-sum and general sidelobe canceler (GSC) beamformers. Additionally, the novel technique of combining the GSC with TF masking is investigated and its …
Perceptual Ruler For Quantifying Speech Intelligibility In Cocktail Party Scenarios, Kirstin M. Brangers
Perceptual Ruler For Quantifying Speech Intelligibility In Cocktail Party Scenarios, Kirstin M. Brangers
Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering
Systems designed to enhance intelligibility of speech in noise are difficult to evaluate quantitatively because intelligibility is subjective and often requires feedback from large populations for consistent evaluations. Attempts to quantify the evaluation have included related measures such as the Speech Intelligibility Index. These require separating speech and noise signals, which precludes its use on experimental recordings. This thesis develops a procedure using an Intelligibility Ruler (IR) for efficiently quantifying intelligibility. A calibrated Mean Opinion Score (MOS) method is also implemented in order to compare repeatability over a population of 24 subjective listeners. Results showed that subjects using the IR …