Speech to Speech Synthesis for Voice Impersonation

Numerous models have shown great success in the fields of speech recognition as well as speech synthesis, but models for speech to speech processing have not been heavily explored. We propose Speech to Speech Synthesis Network (STSSN), a model based on current state of the art systems that fuses the two disciplines in order to perform effective speech to speech style transfer for the purpose of voice impersonation. We show that our proposed model is quite powerful, and succeeds in generating realistic audio samples despite a number of drawbacks in its capacity. We benchmark our proposed model by comparing it with a generative adversarial model which accomplishes a similar task, and show that ours produces more convincing results.

Assessing Low Back Movement with Motion Tape Sensor Data Through Deep Learning

Back pain is a pervasive issue affecting a significant portion of the population, often worsened by certain movements of the lower back. Assessing these movements is important for helping clinicians prescribe appropriate physical therapy. However, it can be difficult to monitor patients' movements remotely outside the clinic. High-fidelity data from motion capture sensors can be used to classify different movements, but these sensors are costly and impractical for use in free-living environments. Motion Tape (MT), a new fabric-based wearable sensor, addresses these issues by being low cost and portable. Despite these advantages, novelty and variability in sensor stability make the MT dataset small scale and inherent to noise. In this work, we propose the Motion-Tape Augmentation Inference Model (MT-AIM), a deep learning classification pipeline trained on MT data. In order to address the challenges of limited sample size and noise present within the MT dataset, MT-AIM leverages conditional generative models to generate synthetic MT data of a desired movement, as well as predicting joint kinematics as additional features. This combination of synthetic data generation and feature augmentation enables MT-AIM to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in classifying lower back movements, bridging the gap between physiological sensing and movement analysis.