Method of upgrading a data stream of multimedia data

• US 20020128813A1
• Filed: 01/07/2002
• Published: 09/12/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 01/09/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Robert Bosch GmbH
• Original Assignee: Robert Bosch GmbH
• Inventors: Engelsberg, Andreas, Wollborn, Michael, Kussmann, Holger, Mengel, Andre, Mecke, Sven
• Granted Patent: US 7,092,873 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/1
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/08 Text analysis or generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text, e.g. grapheme to phoneme translation, prosody generation or stress or intonation determination

Abstract

For upgrading a data stream of multimedia data, which comprises features with textual description, a set of phonetic translation hints is included in the data stream, which specifies the phonetic transcription of parts or words of the textual description. The phonetic transcriptions need not be repeated for each occurrence of a word. This reduces the amount of data necessary for storing or transmitting the description text.

Claims

1. A method for upgrading a data stream of multimedia data, said data stream comprising features with textual description, said method comprising including a set of phonetic translation hints in the data stream in addition to the textual description, and wherein said phonetic translation hints specify the phonetic transcription of parts or words of the textual description.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein each of said phonetic translation hints is followed by a word and said phonetic transcription of said word.

3. The method according to claim 1 or 2, wherein each of said phonetic translation hints with said phonetic transcription is valid for at least a portion of said textual description without requiring repetition of said phonetic transcription for each occurrence of a word, for which the phonetic transcription is given, in said textual description.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein said phonetic translation hints are embedded in an MPEG data stream associated with textual type descriptors.

5. The method according to claim 4, wherein said MPEG data stream is an MPEG-7 data stream.

6. The method according to claim 1, further comprising referring to an alphabet in a predetermined format for representation of phonetic transcription information.

7. The method according to claim 6, wherein said alphabet is an international phonetic alphabet or SAMPA.

8. The method according to claim 1, wherein said phonetic translation hints include a limited number of phonemes.

9. The method according to claim 8, wherein said phonemes are represented with a binary fixed length or variable length code.

10. The method according to claim 9, wherein coding of said phonemes takes into account statistics of the phonemes.

11. The method according to claim 1, further comprising storing said phonetic translation hints in a speech recognition system to better identify corresponding elements of the textual description.

12. The method according to claim 11, wherein the phonetic translation hints together with the corresponding elements of the textual description are implemented in text-to-speech interfaces, speech recognition devices, navigation systems, audio broadcast equipment or telephone applications, in which said textual description is used in combination with phonetic information for search or filtering of information.