Non-Linear and Non-Conventional Speech Processing: Alternative Techniques

Jordi Sole-Casals 0 1 Vladimir Zaiats 0 1 Enric Monte-Moreno 0 1 0 E. Monte-Moreno Department of Signal Theory and Communications , Escola Te`cnica Superior d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicacio de Barcelona, Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya , c/. Jordi Girona 1-3, Campus Nord UPC, Edifici D5, 08034 Barcelona, Spain 1 J. Sole-Casals (&) V. Zaiats Department of Digital Technologies and Information , Escola Polite`cnica Superior, Universitat de Vic , c/. de la Laura, 13, 08500 Vic (Barcelona ), Spain - An algorithm for voiced/unvoiced decision and pitch estimation from speech signals based on classification of peaks using the auto-correlation of the speech multi-scale product is presented by M. A. Ben Massoud, A. Bouzid, and N. Elloze. A feature reduction system based on the Discriminative Common Vector is proposed by C.M. Travieso, M. del Pozo, M.A. Ferrer, and J. B. Alonso. A new approach to the diagnosis of Ataxia SCA-2 by application of independent component analysis to a set of data obtained by electro-oculography is presented by R. V. Garca, F. Rojas, C. G. Puntonet, B. San Roman, L. Velazquez, and R. Rodrguez. A formant tracking technique based on Fourier ridges detection aiming at improving the performance of these algorithms is presented by I. Jemaa, K. Ouni and Y. Laprie A new architecture for vocabulary independent keyword detection for cognitive virtual agents (SEMAINE system) is proposed by M. Wollmer, F. Eyber, A. Graves, B. Schuller, and G. Rigoll. Their word spotting model is composed of a dynamic-Bayesian network and a bidirectional longshort-term memory recurrent neural network. An insight into non-linear transformations for improving the performance of an entropy-based voice activity detector is made in the paper by two guest editors (J. S. and V.Z.). By no means has the range of topics in this Special Issue covered all directions in non-linear speech processing. We would rather consider it a sample presenting several areas in progress. In any case, we hope that they will be of interest for the readers of Cognitive Computation. Our thanks are due to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Amir Hussain, for permanent support in preparation of this issue. Of course, this issue would have been impossible without the contributions of all authors. On the other hand, anonymous referees have also done a great job by carefully reading the papers and enriching them by their comments and remarks. It is our pleasure to gratefully acknowledge the financial support obtained by NOLISP09 from the Ministerio de (...truncated)