Statistical Model-Based Voice Activity Detection Based on Second-Order Conditional MAP with Soft Decision

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to statistical model-based voice activity detection (VAD) that incorporates a second-order conditional maximum a posteriori (CMAP) criterion. As a technical improvement for the first-order CMAP criterion in [1], we consider both the current observation and the voice activity decision in the previous two frames to take full consideration of the interframe correlation of voice activity. This is clearly different from the previous approach [1] in that we employ the voice activity decisions in the second-order (previous two frames) CMAP, which has quadruple thresholds with an additional degree of freedom, rather than the first-order (previous single frame). Also, a soft-decision scheme is incorporated, resulting in time-varying thresholds for further performance improvement. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional CMAP-based VAD technique under various experimental conditions.