QUT-NOISE Databases and Protocols - Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Vision Technologies

Overview

This distribution contains the QUT-NOISE database and the code required to create the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database from the QUT-NOISE database and a locally installed copy of the TIMIT database. It also contains code to create the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol on top of an existing speaker recognition evaluation database (such as NIST evaluations). Further information on the QUT-NOISE and QUT-NOISE-TIMIT databases is available in our paper:

D. Dean, S. Sridharan, R. Vogt, M. Mason (2010) “The QUT-NOISE-TIMIT corpus for the evaluation of voice activity detection algorithms”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2010, Makuhari Messe International Convention Complex, Makuhari, Japan.

This paper is also available in the file: docs/Dean2010, The QUT-NOISE-TIMIT corpus for the evaluation of voice activity detection algorithm.pdf, distributed with this database.

Further information on the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol is available in our paper:
D. Dean, A. Kanagasundaram, H. Ghaemmaghami, M. Hafizur, S. Sridharan (2015) “The QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol for the evaluation of noisy speaker recognition”. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2015, September, Dresden, Germany.

This paper is also available in the file: docs/Dean2015, The QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol for the evaluation of noisy speaker recognition.pdf, distributed with this database.

Licensing

The QUT-NOISE data itself is licensed CC-BY-SA, and the code required to create the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database and QUT-NOISE-SRE protocols is licensed under the BSD license. Please consult the approriate LICENSE.txt files (in the code and QUT-NOISE directories) for more information. To attribute this database, please include the following citation:
D. Dean, S. Sridharan, R. Vogt, M. Mason (2010) “The QUT-NOISE-TIMIT corpus for the evaluation of voice activity detection algorithms”, in Proceedings of Interspeech 2010, Makuhari Messe International Convention Complex, Makuhari, Japan.

If your work is based upon the QUT-NOISE-SRE, please also include this citation:
D. Dean, A. Kanagasundaram, H. Ghaemmaghami, M. Hafizur, S. Sridharan (2015) “The QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol for the evaluation of noisy speaker recognition”. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2015, September, Dresden, Germany.

Download and Installation

Download the following QUT-NOISE*.zip files:

Please unzip all QUT-NOISE*.zip files into the same directory, and you should have the following directory structure:

QUT-NOISE
+–QUT-NOISE (.wav files collected for QUT-NOISE)
| +–labels (time labels)
| +–impulses (calculated room impulse responses)
+–QUT-NOISE-TIMIT (will contain the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database after installation)
+–code (code used to create QUT-NOISE-TIMIT)
+–docs (this file and the publications).

At this point, you have the QUT-NOISE database. If you wish to create the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database, or create a database based upon the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol please continue to read the following sections.

Creating QUT-NOISE-TIMIT

Obtaining TIMIT
- In order to construct the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database from the QUT-NOISE data supplied here you will need to obtain a copy of the TIMIT database from the Linguistic Data Consortium. If you just want to use the QUT-NOISE database, or you wish to combine it with different speech data, TIMIT is not required.
Creating QUT-NOISE-TIMIT
- Once you have obtained TIMIT, download and install a copy of VOICEBOX: Speech Processing Toolbox for MATLAB and install it in your MATLABPATH.
- Run matlab in the QUT-NOISE/code directory, and run the function: createQUTNOISETIMIT(‘/location/of/timit-cd/timit’). This will create the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database in the QUT-NOISE/QUT-NOISE-TIMIT directory.
- If you wish to verify that the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database matches that evaluated in our original paper, please check that the md5sums (use md5sum on unix-based OSes) match those in the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT/md5sum.txt file.
Using the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol
- The code related to the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocol can be used in two ways:
  - To create a collection of noisy audio files across the scenarios in the QUT-NOISE database at different noise levels, or,
  - To recreate a list of file names based on the QUT-NOISE-SRE protocl produced by another researcher, having already done (1). This allows existing research to be reproduced without having to send large volumes of audio around.
- If you are interested in creating your own noisy database from an existing SRE database (1 above), please look at the example script exampleQUTNOISESRE.sh in the QUT-NOISE/code directory. You will need to make some modifications, but it should give you the right idea.
- If you are interested in creating our QUT-NOISE-NIST2008 database published at Interspeech 2015, you can find the list of created noisy files in the QUT-NOISE-NIST2008.train.short2.list and QUT-NOISE-NIST2008.test.short3.list files in the QUT-NOISE/code directory.
- These files can be recreated as follows (provided you have access to the NIST2008 SRE data):
  - Run matlab in the QUT-NOISE/code directory, and run the following functions:
```
createQUTNOISESREfiles('NIST2008.train.short2.list', ...
 'QUT-NOISE-NIST2008.train.short2.list', ...
 '<location/of/NIST2008/SRE&rt;', ...
 '../QUT-NOISE-NIST2008')
 createQUTNOISESREfiles('NIST2008.test.short3.list', ...
 'QUT-NOISE-NIST2008.test.short3.list', ...
 '<location/of/NIST/2008/SRE&rt;', ...
 '../QUT-NOISE-NIST2008')
```

This may take some time to execute, so if you have access to a computing cluster, it may be worth dividing the QUT-NOISE-NIST2008.* files into smaller chunks and running in parallel. Just make sure that testing or training noisy files are associated with testing or training clean files (The NIST2008.* files) – but you don’t need to split the clean file lists.