Robust Histogram Equalization Using Compensated Probability Distribution

A mismatch between the training and the test conditions often causes a drastic decrease in the performance of the speech recognition systems. In this paper, non-linear transformation techniques based on histogram equalization in the acoustic feature space are studied for reducing the mismatched condition. The purpose of histogram equalization(HEQ) is to convert the probability distribution of test speech into the probability distribution of training speech. While conventional histogram equalization methods consider only the probability distribution of a test speech, for noise-corrupted test speech, its probability distribution is also distorted. The transformation function obtained by this distorted probability distribution maybe bring about miss-transformation of feature vectors, and this causes the performance of histogram equalization to decrease. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of calculating noise-removed probability distribution by using assumption that the CDF of noisy speech feature vectors consists of component of speech feature vectors and component of noise feature vectors, and this compensated probability distribution is used in HEQ process. In the AURORA-2 framework, the proposed method reduced the error rate by over $44\%$ in clean training condition compared to the baseline system. For multi training condition, the proposed methods are also better than the baseline system.