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AssigneeIndustrial Technology Research Institute
InventorsChih-Chung Kuo, Chi-Shiang Kuo
Estimating the term…
A method of speech segment selection for concatenative synthesis based on prosody-aligned distance measure is disclosed. This method is based on comparison of speech segments segmented from a speech corpus, wherein speech segments are fully prosody-aligned to each other before distortion measure. With prosody alignment embedded in selection process, distortion resulting from possible prosody modification in synthesis could be taken into account objectively in selection phase. In order to carry out the purpose of the present invention, automatic segmentation, pitch marking and PSOLA method work together for prosody alignment. Two distortion measures, MFCC and PSQM are used for comparing two prosody-aligned segments of speech because of human perceptual consideration.
A method of speech segment selection for concatenative synthesis based on prosody-aligned distance measure, comprising the steps of:
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Elementary speech units used in speech synthesisers; Concatenation rules: concatenation rules
Methods for producing synthetic speech; Speech synthesisers: details of speech synthesis systems, e.g. synthesiser structure or memory management
Speech analysis techniques or speech synthesis
Term end not estimated
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of speech synthesis, and more particularly, to a method of speech segment selection for concatenative synthesis based on prosody-aligned distance measure.
2. Description of Related Art
FIG. 1 is a flow chart showing the operation of the present invention; and
FIG. 2 is a schematic drawing showing the prosody of the source segment modified according to the prosody of the target segment.
With reference to FIG. 1, there is shown a preferred embodiment of the process of speech segment selection for concatenative synthesis based on prosody-aligned distance measure in accordance with the present invention. In this embodiment, it can automatically select synthetic speech units from a speech corpus 10 for processing concatenative synthesis, wherein the speech corpus 10 is recorded with a variety of speech data including primitive speech waveform with corresponding text transcription.
In order to select specific synthetic speech units, speech data stored in speech corpus 10 will be segmented into N speech segments according to a unit type (S401). Those N speech segments are denoted as S1, S2, . . . , and SN, and each speech segment has prosody information in accordance with its energy, duration, pitch, and phase. The unit type can be a syllable, a vowel, or a consonant. In this embodiment, the unit type is preferably a syllable, and the syllable is composed of a vowel as a basis and at least 0 consonant to modify the vowel. Due to a great deal of speech data stored in the speech corpus 10, it can substantially enhance the efficiency and accuracy of speech synthesis by using a computer system to perform automatic segmentation. In this embodiment, the computer system uses Markov modeling algorithm to perform automatic segmentation.
In step S102, pitch marks are respectively located for each speech segments S1, S2, . . . , and SN. In each speech segment, pronunciation of a vowel procures a periodic appearance of its pitch impulse, wherein the strongest impulse of each pitch period is the location of pitch mark.