Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Panasonic Corporation

Natsuki Saito

Takahiro Kamai

Yumiko Kato

Yoshifumi Hirose

Satoshi Sato

Tsuyoshi Inoue

Katsuhiro Kanamori

Mikiya Nakata

Mitsuru Endo

Akira Ishida

Tomohiro Konuma

Tatsuya Kimura

The normal vector information generating device generates normal vector information on the surface of an object, and includes: an image information obtaining unit obtaining information about an image of the object, the information including luminance information about luminance of light from the object and polarization information about polarization of the light; a shadow area extracting unit extracting an attached shadow area and a cast shadow area from the image based on the luminance information and the polarization information, the attached shadow area appearing on the surface of the object depending on an angle of incidence light, and the cast shadow area appearing on the surface of a material body when the light is blocked by the object; and a normal vector information generating unit generating normal vector information identifying a normal vector on the surface of the object in the attached shadow area using the polarization information.

Normal vector information generating device and normal vector information generating method

A voice synthesis device for generating synthetic voice having great freedom in voice quality and good sound quality from text data is provided. The voice synthesis device is provided with: voice synthesis DBs (and); a voice synthesis unit () for acquiring a text () and generating a voice synthesis parameter value sequence () of voice quality A which corresponds to a character that is included in the text () from the voice synthesis DB (); a voice synthesis unit () generating a voice synthesis parameter value sequence () of voice quality Z which corresponds to a character that is included in the text () from the voice synthesis DB (); a voice morphing unit () for generating a intermediate voice synthesis parameter value sequence () for indicating synthetic voice of intermediate voice quality between voice quality A and voice quality Z which corresponds to a character that is included in the text () from the voice synthesis parameter value sequence () of voice quality A and voice quality Z; and a speaker () for converting the generated intermediate voice synthesis parameter value sequence () to the synthetic voice and outputting the resulting synthetic voice.

Voice synthesis device

A speech synthesizer that provides high-quality sound along with stable sound quality, including: a target parameter generation unit; a speech element DB; an element selection unit; a mixed parameter judgment unit which determines an optimum parameter combination of target parameters and speech elements; a parameter integration unit which integrates the parameters; and a waveform generation unit which generates synthetic speech. High-quality and stable synthetic speech is generated by combining, per parameter dimension, the parameters with stable sound quality generated by the target parameter generation unit with speech elements with high sound quality and a sense of true speech selected by the element selection unit.

Speech synthesizer, speech synthesizing method, and program

A speech synthesis apparatus appropriately transforms a voice characteristic of speech. The speech synthesis apparatus includes an element storing unit in which speech elements are stored, and a function storing unit in which transformation functions are stored, an adaptability judging unit which derives a degree of similarity by comparing a speech element stored in the element storing unit with an acoustic characteristic of the speech element used for generating a transformation function stored in the function storing unit. The speech synthesis apparatus also includes a selecting unit and voice characteristic transforming unit which transforms, for each speech element stored in the element storing unit, based on the degree of similarity derived by the adaptability judging unit, a voice characteristic of the speech element by applying one of the transformation functions stored in the function storing unit.

Speech synthesis apparatus and speech synthesis method

To provide a speech synthesis apparatus which can prevent user confusion and deterioration of the quality of synthesized speech resulting from incompleteness of the sentences to be read out, and thus can read out speech which is easily understandable to the user. The speech synthesis apparatus includes: an incomplete part-of-sentence detection unit which detects incomplete parts-of-sentences which become linguistically incomplete because of the presence of a missing character string and which complements the detected incomplete parts-of-sentences having a missing character string, with reference to the e-mail texts which have been received by and accumulated in a mail box; a speech synthesis unit which generates synthesized speech based on the complemented e-mail texts; an incomplete part-of-sentence obscuring unit which obscures the acoustic clarity of the synthesized speech corresponding to the incomplete parts-of-sentences detected by the incomplete part-of-sentence detection unit; and a speaker device which plays back and outputs the generated synthesized speech.

Speech synthesis system for naturally reading incomplete sentences

A method and apparatus for speech recognition of the present application has a process to collate, with an input utterance, an acoustic model corresponding to a hypothesis to be expressed by the connection of utterance segments, such as phonemes or syllables, and developed according to a length of an input utterance by an inter-word connection rule thereby obtaining a recognition score. Within a word of the hypothesis, the similar hypotheses high in utterance score within a predetermined threshold from the maximum value of the score are all held to a word end irrespectively of the number of hypotheses. Meanwhile, at a word end of the hypotheses, the hypotheses are narrowed to a predetermined number of upper ranking in the order of higher score.

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Osaka, Japan

Natsuki Saito