SBIR Phase I: iGlasses: An Appliance for Improving Speech Understanding in Face-to-Face Communication and Classroom Situations

这项小型企业创新研究（SBIR）项目将推动人机交互、语音、机器学习和辅助技术的发展。本研究的创新之处在于开发和测试设计一种修饰眼镜所需的技术，该眼镜将对对话者的语音进行连续的实时声学分析，并将用户语音的几个连续声学特征转换为显示在眼镜上的连续视觉特征。初步研究表明，识别孤立的听觉单词的强大特征并将其实时转换为可见特征是可能的。本研究将此研究扩展到句子，并测试了不同的特征检测器和自动识别模型。拟议的活动将通过为所有个人都能以极低成本获得的系统提供研究和理论基础来影响社会。它不需要识字的用户，因为它不像标题系统那样提供书面信息；它是与年龄无关的，因为它可以被幼儿、青少年和整个生命周期使用；它适用于所有语言，因为它是独立于语言的，因为所有语言都具有相同的语音特征和高度相似的相应声学特征；它将为佩戴助听器和人工耳蜗的人提供重大帮助；这对许多有语言障碍的人，甚至对学习阅读的孩子都是有益的。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will advance the state of the art in human machine interaction, speech, machine learning and assistive technologies. The innovation in the proposed research is to develop and test the technology required to design an embellished eyeglass, which will perform continuous real-time acoustic analysis of the interlocutor's speech and transform several continuous acoustic features of the user's speech into continuous visual features displayed on the eyeglasses. Pilot research has demonstrated that it is possible to recognize robust characteristics of isolated auditory words and to transform them into visible features in real time. The proposed research extends this research to sentences along with tests of different feature detectors and automatic recognition models. The proposed activity will impact society by providing a research and theoretical foundation for a system that would be available to all individuals at a very low cost. It does not require literate users because no written information is presented as would be the case in a captioning system; it is age-independent in that it might be used by toddlers, adolescents, and throughout the life span; it is functional for all languages because it is language independent given that all languages share the same phonetic features with highly similar corresponding acoustic characteristics; it would provide significant help for people with hearing aids and cochlear implants; and it would be beneficial for many individuals with language challenges and even for children learning to read.