Patent ID: 8255222

Claim:
A speech separating apparatus that separates an input speech signal into vocal tract information and voicing source information, said speech separating apparatus comprising: a processor; a vocal tract information extracting unit configured to extract vocal tract information from the input speech signal; a filter smoothing unit configured to smooth, in a first time constant, the vocal tract information extracted by said vocal tract information extracting unit; an inverse filtering unit configured to calculate, using said processor, a filter having an inverse characteristic to a frequency response of the vocal tract information smoothed by said filter smoothing unit, and to filter the input speech signal by using the calculated filter; and a voicing source modeling unit configured to take, from the input speech signal filtered by said inverse filtering unit, a waveform included in a second time constant shorter than the first time constant, and to calculate, for each waveform that is taken, voicing source information from the each waveform.