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Reverberation Mitigation of Speech

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: FA8750-16-C-0292
Agency Tracking Number: F15A-T17-0048
Amount: $750,000.00
Phase: Phase II
Program: STTR
Solicitation Topic Code: AF15-AT17
Solicitation Number: 2015.0
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2015
Award Year: 2016
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2016-08-30
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2018-11-30
Small Business Information
145 Graham Ave, A170 ASTeCC Bldg
Lexington, KY 40506
United States
DUNS: 808071695
HUBZone Owned: Yes
Woman Owned: Yes
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: Yes
Principal Investigator
 Dr. Kalyan Ganesan
 (859) 489-0156
 kganesan@minervatechnology.com
Business Contact
 Dr. Bhanu Ganesan
Phone: (859) 489-0156
Email: minervatech@cox.net
Research Institution
 Binghamton University
 Dr. Stephen Zahorian
 
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, NY 13902
United States

 (607) 777-4846
 Nonprofit College or University
Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is in wide use today and has been successfully integrated into a number of applications. Although there are also many potential applications for automatic speaker identification (SID), SID accuracy rates are generally not sufficient for widespread use in practical applications. For high accuracy ASR and SID, the microphone must be located near the talker. However, when the speaker is at some distance from the microphone as in a hands-free communication, or in a meeting room, there is a major problem with the captured speech signals caused by interfering sounds and reverberations. While traveling from the speaker to the microphone, the wavefront of the speech is repeatedly reflected off the walls or other objects in the room. These reflections, perceived as reverberation, alter the acoustic characteristics of the original speech. The SID recognition accuracy of reverberant speech degrades considerably. During Phase I, we demonstrated ~5% Equal Error Rate (EER) performance for SID using artificially reverberated telephone speech from the NTIMIT and Mixer-6 databases. A continuation of this work will result in even more powerful solutions for speech reverberation mitigation.A high accuracy SID system will thus be created in Phase II for reverberant speech.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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