This paper presents a novel statistical sample-based approach for Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based Voice Conversion (VC). Although GMM-based VC has the promising flexibility of model adaptation, quality in converted speech is significantly worse than that of natural speech. This paper addresses the problem of inaccurate modeling, which is one of the main reasons causing the quality degradatio...

While the classical framework has a rich set of limited information procedures such as GMM and other related methods, the situation is not so in the Bayesian framework. We develop a limited information procedure in the Bayesian framework that does not require the knowledge of the full likelihood. The developed procedure is a Bayesian counterpart of the classical GMM but has advantages over the ...

Gaussian mixture modeling with universal background model (GMM-UBM) is a widely used method for speaker identification, where the GMM model is used to characterize a specific speaker’s voice. The estimation of model parameters is generally performed based on the maximum likelihood (ML) or maximum a posteriori (MAP) criteria. In this way, interspeaker information that discriminates between diffe...

The HMM (Hidden Markov Model) is a probabilistic model of the joint probability of a collection of random variables with both observations and states. The GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) is a finite mixture probability distribution model. Although the two models have a close relationship, they are always discussed independently and separately. The EM (Expectation-Maximum) algorithm is a general me...

The current paper proposes skew Gaussian mixture models for speaker recognition and an associated algorithm for its training from experimental data. Speaker identification experiments were conducted, in which speakers were modeled using the familiar Gaussian mixture models (GMM), and the new skewGMM. Each model type was evaluated using two sets of feature vectors, the mel-frequency cepstral coe...

Automatic dialect classification has gained interests in the field of speech research because it is important to characterize speaker traits and to estimate knowledge that could improve integrated speech technology (e.g., speech recognition, speaker recognition). This study addresses novel advances in unsupervised spontaneous Latin American Spanish dialect classification. The problem considers ...

One-to-many eigenvoice conversion (EVC) allows the conversion of a specific source speaker into arbitrary target speakers. Eigenvoice Gaussian mixture model (EV-GMM) is trained in advance with multiple parallel data sets consisting of the source speaker and many pre-stored target speakers. The EV-GMM is adapted for arbitrary target speakers using only a few utterances by estimating a small numb...

Discriminative training (DT) methods of acoustic models, such as SVM and MMI-training GMM, have been proved effective in spoken language recognition. In this paper we propose a DT method for GMM using the large margin (LM) estimation. Unlike traditional MMI or MCE methods, the LM estimation attempts to enhance the generalization ability of GMM to deal with new data that exhibits mismatch with t...

This paper describes a method for determining the vocal tract spectrum from articulatory movements using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to synthesize speech with articulatory information. The GMM on joint probability density of articulatory parameters and acoustic spectral parameters is trained using a parallel acousticarticulatory speech database. We evaluate the performance of the GMM-based m...