• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.22-31
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• 2000

In this paper, we propose a method for removing noise components in the feature extraction process for robust speech recognition. This method is based on blind separation using independent component analysis (ICA). Given two noisy speech recordings the algorithm linearly separates speech from the unwanted noise signal. To apply ICA as closely as possible to the feature level for recognition, a new spectral analysis is presented. It modifies the computation of band energies by previously averaging out fast Fourier transform (FFT) points in several divided ranges within one met-scaled band. The simple analysis using sample variances of band energies of speech and noise, and recognition experiments showed its noise robustness. For noisy speech signals recorded in real environments, the proposed method which applies ICA to the new spectral analysis improved the recognition performances to a considerable extent, and was particularly effective for low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). This method gives some insights into applying ICA to feature levels and appears useful for robust speech recognition.