An acoustic Doppler-based silent speech interface technology using generative adversarial networks

In this paper, a Silent Speech Interface (SSI) technology was proposed in which Doppler frequency shifts of the reflected signal were used to synthesize the speech signals when 40kHz ultrasonic signal was incident to speaker's mouth region. In SSI, the mapping rules from the features derived from non-speech signals to those from audible speech signals was constructed, the speech signals are synthesized from non-speech signals using the constructed mapping rules. The mapping rules were built by minimizing the overall errors between the estimated and true speech parameters in the conventional SSI methods. In the present study, the mapping rules were constructed so that the distribution of the estimated parameters is similar to that of the true parameters by using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The experimental result using 60 Korean words showed that, both objectively and subjectively, the performance of the proposed method was superior to that of the conventional neural networks-based methods.