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A Non-Linear VAD for Noisy Environments

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Abstract

This paper deals with non-linear transformations for improving the performance of an entropy-based voice activity detector (VAD). The idea to use a non-linear transformation has already been applied in the field of speech linear prediction, or linear predictive coding, based on source separation techniques, where a score function is added to classical equations in order to take into account the true distribution of the signal. We explore the possibility of estimating the entropy of frames after calculating its score function, instead of using original frames. We observe that if the signal is clean, the estimated entropy is essentially the same; if the signal is noisy, however, the frames transformed using the score function may give entropy that is different in voiced frames as compared to unvoiced ones. Experimental evidence is given to show that this fact enables voice activity detection under high noise, where the simple entropy method fails.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the University of Vic under grants R0904, R0912, and by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN) under grant TEC2008-02717-E/TEC. The authors thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments that have leaded to improvement of the paper.

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  1. Digital Technologies Group, University of Vic, Sagrada Família 7, 08500, Vic, Spain

    Jordi Solé-Casals & Vladimir Zaiats

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  1. Jordi Solé-Casals
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  2. Vladimir Zaiats
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Correspondence to Jordi Solé-Casals.

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Solé-Casals, J., Zaiats, V. A Non-Linear VAD for Noisy Environments. Cogn Comput 2, 191–198 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-010-9037-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-010-9037-4

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