A Comparison of Front-Ends for Robust Speech Recognition

Zero-crossings with Peak amplitudes (ZCPA) model motivated by human auditory periphery was proposed to extract reliable features form speech signals even in noisy environments for robust speech recognition. In this paper, the performance of the ZCPA model is further improved by incorporating conventional speech processing techniques into the model output. Spectral and cepstral representations of the ZCPA model output are compared, and the incorporation of dynamic features with several different lengths of time-derivative window are evaluated. Also, comparative evaluations with other front-ends in real-world noisy environments are performed, and result in the superiority of the ZCPA model.