Elina Helander

[In Finnish]

Researcher in Audio Research Team of the Multimedia team
Deparment of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology.

Research interests: speech processing, voice conversion, speech synthesis, speech modification, speech parameterization, speaker identity in speech signals, prosody modeling

Contact: firstname.lastname@tut.fi

List of publications

Journal articles

• Elina Helander, Hanna Silen, Tuomas Virtanen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Voice Conversion Using Dynamic Kernel Partial Least Squares Regression," IEEE Transactions On Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 3, no. 20, pp. 806-817, March 2012.


• Elina Helander, Tuomas Virtanen, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Voice Conversion Using Partial Least Squares Regression" IEEE Transactions On Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 912-921, July 2010.

Conference articles

• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Prediction of Voice Aperiodicity based on Spectral Representations in HMM Speech Synthesis," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 105-108, 2011.


• Elina Helander, Hanna Silen, Joaquin Miguez, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Maximum a Posteriori Voice Conversion Using Sequential Monte Carlo methods," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 1716-1719, 2010.


• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Analysis of Duration Prediction Accuracy in HMM-based Speech Synthesis," in Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 2010.


• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, Konsta Koppinen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Using Robust Viterbi Algorithm and HMM-Modeling in Unit selection TTS to Replace Units of Poor Quality," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 166-169, 2010.


• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Parameterization of Vocal Fry in HMM-based Speech Synthesis," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 1775-1778, 2009.


• Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "LSF Mapping for Voice Conversion with Very Small Training Sets," in Proceedings of ICASSP, pp. 4669-4672, 2008.


• Elina Helander, Jan Schwarz, Jani Nurminen, Hanna Silen, and Moncef Gabbouj. "On the Impact of Alignment on Voice Conversion Performance," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 1453-1456, 2008.


• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Evaluation of Finnish Unit Selection and HMM-based Speech Synthesis," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 1853-1856, 2008.


• Elina Helander and Jani Nurminen, "A Novel Method for Prosody Prediction in Voice Conversion," in Proceedings of ICASSP, pp. IV-509-IV-512, 2007.


• Elina Helander and Jani Nurminen, "On the Importance of Pure Prosody in the Perception of Speaker Identity," in Proceedings of Interspeech, pp. 2665-2668, 2007.


• Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Analysis of LSF Frame Selection in Voice Conversion," in Proceedings of International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM), pp. 651-656, 2007.


• Elina Helander, Hanna Silen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "The Use of Diphone Variants in Optimal Text Selection for Finnish Unit Selection Speech Synthesis," in Proceedings of SPECOM, pp. 239-299, 2007.


• Hanna Silen, Elina Helander, Konsta Koppinen, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Building a Finnish Unit Selection TTS System," in Proceedings of 6th Speech Synthesis Workshop, pp. 310-316, 2007.


• Jani Tikkinen, Elina Helander, and Ari Visa, "Joint Utilization of Incoherently and Coherently Integrated Radar Signal in Helicopter Categorization," in Proceedings of IEEE International Radar Conference, Radar - a Global Perspective, pp. 540-545, 2005.


• Jani Tikkinen, Elina Helander, Timo Hintikka, and Ari Visa, "An Improved Method for Helicopter Categorization," in Proceedings of the SPIE Radar Sensor Technology IX, vol. 5788, pp.164-171, 2005.


• Juho Vihonen, Timo Ala-Kleemola, Elina Helander , Jani Tikkinen, and Ari Visa, "New Detection Algorithm for Poor Signal-to-noise Conditions", in Proceedings of the IEEE Radar Conference, pp. 345-349, 2003.

Book chapter

• Jani Nurminen, Hanna Silén, Victor Popa, Elina Helander, and Moncef Gabbouj, "Voice Conversion," in Speech Enhancement, Modeling and Recognition - Algorithms and Applications, ISBN 979-953-307-620-0, S. Ramakrishnan, Ed., INTECH 2012.

Granted patents and patent applications

• Elina Helander and Jani Nurminen, "Prosody Conversion," US Patent 7996222, granted in August 2011.


• Elina Helander, Jani Nurminen Victor Popa, and Jilei Tian, "Voice Conversion Training and Data Collection," US Patent 7813924, granted in October 2010.


• Jani Nurminen, Hanna Silen and Elina Helander, "Methods and Apparatuses for Facilitating Speech Synthesis," US Patent Application, filed in April 2010.


• Elina Helander and Jani Nurminen, "Method, Apparatus and Computer Program Product for Providing Improved Voice Conversion,? US Patent Application, filed in October 2007.