UCL Enhance Home Page
UCL Enhance is a program for the enhancement of the intelligibility of
speech recordings. The program incorporates a number of standard
techniques for manipulating the overall amplitude of the signal and for
the removal of steady-state additive noise. However, the program is
unusual in its ability to detect and enhance selective regions of the speech signal
based on their phonetic properties. This phonetically-sensitive method
of enhancement was developed and evaluated in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London under two
research project grants funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council.
For information about the scientific basis for the phonetic enhancement method, please refer to the publications listed in the Learn more section.
UCL Enhance is a simple application that is complete in itself but which is also designed to be compatible with the Speech Filing System (SFS) tools for speech research.
Read the UCL Enhance help file on-line.
Download and Installation
The latest version of UCL Enhance is only available from:
Download the EXE file run it to automatically unpack and install. This program runs on Windows platforms only.
Want to learn more?
Publications
These publications may be downloaded from the Enhance project web site at http://www.enhance.phon.ucl.ac.uk/.
- Hazan, V. and Simpson, A. (1998) The effect of cue-enhancement on the intelligibility of nonsense word and sentence materials presented in noise. Speech Communication, 24, 211-226.
- Hazan, V., Simpson, A. and Huckvale, M. (1998) Enhancement techniques to improve the intelligibility of consonants in noise : Speaker and listener effects. Proceedings of International Conference of Speech and Language Processing, Sydney, Australia, December 1998.
- Huckvale, M. (1996) A syntactic pattern recognition method for the automatic location of potential enhancement regions in running speech. Speech, Hearing and Language 1996 , working papers from Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL.
- Hazan, V. and Simpson, A. (1996) Enhancing information-rich regions of natural VCV and sentence materials presented in noise. Proceedings ICSLP Philadelphia.
- Hazan, V. and Simpson, A. (1996) Cue-enhancement strategies for natural VCV and sentence materials presented in noise. Speech, Hearing and Language 1996 , working papers from Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL.
- Hazan, V. and Simpson, A. (1995) Enhancing the perceptual salience of information-rich regions of natural intervocalic consonants. Proceedings Eurospeech 95, Madrid.
Speech and Hearing
If you find the study of speech interesting and would like to know more, why not visit the Internet Institute of Speech and Hearing at www.speechandhearing.net ? There you will find tutorials, reference material, laboratory experiments and contact details of professional organisations.
Bug reports
Please send suggestions for improvements and reports of program faults to sfs@pals.ucl.ac.uk.
Please note that we are unable to provide help with the use of this program.
Copyright
UCLEnhance is not public domain software, its intellectual property is owned by Mark Huckvale, University College London. However UCLEnhance may be used and copied without charge as long as the program and help file remain unmodified and continue to carry this copyright notice. Please contact the author for other licensing arrangements. UCLEnhance carries no warranty of any kind, you use it at your own risk.
