Conversion from whispered speech to normal speech using the extended bilinear transformation method

A method of conversion from whispered speech to normal speech using the extended bilinear transformation was proposed. On account of the different deviation degrees of the whisper＇s formants in different frequency bands, the spectrum of the whispered speech will be processed in the separate partitions of this paper. On the basis of this spectrum, we will establish a conversion function able to usefully convert whispered speech to normal speech. Because of the whisper＇s non-linear offset in relation to normal speech, this paper introduces an expansion factor in the bilinear transform function making it correspond more closely to the actual conversion demands of whispered speech to normal speech. The introduction of this factor takes the non-linear move of the spectrum and the compression of the formant bandwidth into consideration, thus effectively reducing the spectrum distortion distance in the conversion. The experiment results show that the conversion presented in this paper effectively improves both the sound quality and the intelligibility of whispered speech.

Frequency Weighting Filter Design for Automotive Ride Comfort Evaluation

Few study gives guidance to design weighting filters according to the frequency weighting factors,and the additional evaluation method of automotive ride comfort is not made good use of in some countries.Based on the regularities of the weighting factors,a method is proposed and the vertical and horizontal weighting filters are developed.The whole frequency range is divided several times into two parts with respective regularity.For each division,a parallel filter constituted by a low-and a high-pass filter with the same cutoff frequency and the quality factor is utilized to achieve section factors.The cascading of these parallel filters obtains entire factors.These filters own a high order.But,low order filters are preferred in some applications.The bilinear transformation method and the least P-norm optimal infinite impulse response（IIR） filter design method are employed to develop low order filters to approximate the weightings in the standard.In addition,with the window method,the linear phase finite impulse response（FIR） filter is designed to keep the signal from distorting and to obtain the staircase weighting.For the same case,the traditional method produces 0.330 7 m · s^–2 weighted root mean square（r.m.s.） acceleration and the filtering method gives 0.311 9 m · s^–2 r.m.s.The fourth order filter for approximation of vertical weighting obtains 0.313 9 m · s^–2 r.m.s.Crest factors of the acceleration signal weighted by the weighting filter and the fourth order filter are 3.002 7 and 3.011 1,respectively.This paper proposes several methods to design frequency weighting filters for automotive ride comfort evaluation,and these developed weighting filters are effective.