abstract: Speech is generated by articulators acting on a phonatory source. Identification of this phonatory source and articulatory geometry are individually challenging and ill-posed problems, called speech separation and articulatory inversion, respectively. There exists a trade-off between decomposition and recovered articulatory geometry due to multiple possible mappings between an articulatory configuration and the speech produced. However, if measurements are obtained only from a microphone sensor, they lack any invasive insight and add additional challenge to an already difficult problem. A joint non-invasive estimation strategy that couples articulatory and phonatory knowledge would lead to better articulatory speech synthesis. In this thesis, a joint estimation strategy for speech separation and articulatory geometry recovery is studied. Unlike previous periodic/aperiodic decomposition methods that use stationary speech models within a frame, the proposed model presents a non-stationary speech decomposition method. A parametric glottal source model and an articulatory vocal tract response are represented in a dynamic state space formulation. The unknown parameters of the speech generation components are estimated using sequential Monte Carlo methods under some specific assumptions. The proposed approach is compared with other glottal inverse filtering methods, including iterative adaptive inverse filtering, state-space inverse filtering, and the quasi-closed phase method. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2018

In the domain of automatic speaker verification,  one of the challenges is to keep the malevolent people out of the system.  One way to do this is to create algorithms that are supposed to detect spoofed speech. There are several types of spoofed speech and several ways to detect them, one of which is to look at the glottal flow waveform  (GFW) of a speech signal. This waveform is often estimated using glottal inverse filtering  (GIF),  since, in order to create the ground truth  GFW, special invasive equipment is required.  To the author’s knowledge, no research has been done where the correlation of GFW accuracy and spoofed speech detection (SSD) performance is investigated. This thesis tries to find out if the aforementioned correlation exists or not.  First, the performance of different GIF methods is evaluated, then simple SSD machine learning (ML) models are trained and evaluated based on their macro average precision. The ML models use different datasets composed of parametrized GFWs estimated with the GIF methods from the previous step. Results from the previous tasks are then combined in order to spot any correlations.  The evaluations of the different methods showed that they created GFWs of varying accuracy.  The different machine learning models also showed varying performance depending on what type of dataset that was being used. However, when combining the results, no obvious correlations between GFW accuracy and SSD performance were detected.  This suggests that the overall accuracy of a GFW is not a substantial factor in the performance of machine learning-based SSD algorithms.