• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.37-41
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• 2014

The vector Taylor series (VTS) based method usually employs clean speech Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) when compensating speech feature vectors or adapting the parameters of trained HMMs. It is well-known that noisy speech HMMs trained by the Multi-condition TRaining (MTR) and the Multi-Model-based Speech Recognition framework (MMSR) method perform better than the clean speech HMM in noisy speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a method to use the noise-adapted HMMs in the VTS-based speech feature compensation method. We derived a novel mathematical relation between the train and the test noisy speech feature vector in the log-spectrum domain and the VTS is used to estimate the statistics of the test noisy speech. An iterative EM algorithm is used to estimate train noisy speech from the test noisy speech along with noise parameters. The proposed method was applied to the noise-adapted HMMs trained by the MTR and MMSR and could reduce the relative word error rate significantly in the noisy speech recognition experiments on the Aurora 2 database.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.29-34
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• 2014

In the Vector Taylor Series (VTS)-based noisy speech recognition methods, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are usually trained with clean speech. However, better performance is expected by training the HMM with noisy speech. In a previous study, we could find that Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimation of the training noisy speech in the log-spectrum domain produce improved recognition results, but since the proposed algorithm was done in the log-spectrum domain, it could not be used for the HMM adaptation. In this paper, we modify the previous algorithm to derive a novel mathematical relation between test and training noisy speech in the cepstrum domain and the mean and covariance of the Multi-condition TRaining (MTR) trained noisy speech HMM are adapted. In the noisy speech recognition experiments on the Aurora 2 database, the proposed method produced 10.6% of relative improvement in Word Error Rates (WERs) over the MTR method while the previous MMSE estimation of the training noisy speech produced 4.3% of relative improvement, which shows the superiority of the proposed method.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.75-84
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• 2006

Various methods have been proposed to overcome the problem of speech recognition in the noisy conditions. Among them, the model compensation methods like the parallel model combination (PMC) and Jacobian adaptation (JA) have been found to perform efficiently. The JA is quite effective when we have hidden Markov models (HMMs) already trained in a similar condition as the target environment. In a previous work, we have proposed an improved method for the JA to make it more robust against the changing environments in recognition. In this paper, we further improved its performance by compensating the delta-mean vectors and covariance matrices of the HMM and investigated its feasibility in the multi-model structure for the noisy speech recognition. From the experimental results, we could find that the proposed improved the robustness of the JA and the multi-model approach could be a viable solution in the noisy speech recognition.

• MALSORI
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• no.57
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• pp.153-164
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• 2006

The MMSE-STSA based speech enhancement algorithm is widely used as a preprocessing for noise robust speech recognition. It weighs the gain of each spectral bin of the noisy speech using the estimate of noise and signal power spectrum. In this paper, we investigate the influence of parameters used to estimate the speech signal and noise power in MMSE-STSA upon the recognition performance of noisy speech. For experiments, we use the Aurora2 DB which contains noisy speech with subway, babble, car, and exhibition noises. The HTK-based continuous HMM system is constructed for recognition experiments. Experimental results are presented and discussed with our findings.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.247-257
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• 2004

There has been many research efforts to overcome the problems of speech recognition in the noisy conditions. Among them, the model-based compensation methods such as the parallel model combination (PMC) and vector Taylor series (VTS) have been found to perform efficiently compared with the previous speech enhancement methods or the feature-based approaches. In this paper, a data-driven model compensation approach that adapts the HMM(hidden Markv model) parameters for the noisy speech recognition is proposed. Instead of assuming some statistical approximations as in the conventional model-based methods such as the PMC, the statistics necessary for the HMM parameter adaptation is directly estimated by using the Baum-Welch algorithm. The proposed method has shown improved results compared with the PMC for the noisy speech recognition.

• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.85-96
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• 2007

In this paper, we carried out recognition experiments for noisy speech having various levels of car noise and output of an audio system using the speech interface. The speech interface consists of three parts: pre-processing, acoustic echo canceller, post-processing. First, a high pass filter is employed as a pre-processing part to remove some engine noises. Then, an echo canceller implemented by using an FIR-type filter with an NLMS adaptive algorithm is used to remove the music or speech coming from the audio system in a car. As a last part, the MMSE-STSA based speech enhancement method is applied to the out of the echo canceller to remove the residual noise further. For recognition experiments, we generated test signals by adding music to the car noisy speech from Aurora 2 database. The HTK-based continuous HMM system is constructed for a recognition system. Experimental results show that the proposed speech interface is very promising for robust speech recognition in a noisy car environment.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.21-26
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• 2001

An expectation-maximization (EM) based Bayesian adaptation method for the mean of noise is proposed for noise-robust speech recognition. In the algorithm, the on-line testing utterances are used for the unsupervised Bayesian adaptation and the prior distribution of the noise mean is estimated using the off-line training data. For the noisy speech modeling, the parallel model combination (PMC) method is employed. The proposed method has shown to be effective compared with the conventional PMC method for the speech recognition experiments in a car-noise condition.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.738-741
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• 2009

This research is concerned for improving the result of speech recognition under the noisy speech. We knew that spectral subtraction and recovery of valleys in spectral envelope obtained from noisy speech are more effective for the improvement of the recognition. In this research, the averaged spectral envelope obtained from vowel spectrums are used for the emphasis of valleys. The vocalic spectral information at lower frequency range is emphasized and the spectrum obtained from consonants is not changed. In simulation, the emphasis coefficients are varied on cepstral domain. This method is used for the recognition of noisy digits and is improved.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.115-126
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• 2007

There have been many research efforts to improve the performance of the speech recognizer in noisy conditions. Among them, the model compensation method and the speech enhancement approach have been used widely. In this paper, we propose to combine the two different approaches to further enhance the recognition rates in the noisy speech recognition. For the speech enhancement, the minimum mean square error-short time spectral amplitude (MMSE-STSA) has been adopted and the parallel model combination (PMC) and Jacobian adaptation (JA) have been used as the model compensation approaches. From the experimental results, we could find that the hybrid approach that applies the model compensation methods to the enhanced speech produce better results than just using only one of the two approaches.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.9-14
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• 2009

Speech enhancement methods can be generally classified into a few categories and they have been usually compared with each other in terms of speech quality. For the successful use of speech enhancement methods in speech recognition systems, performance comparisons in terms of speech recognition accuracy are necessary. In this paper, we compared the speech recognition performance of some of the representative speech enhancement algorithms which are popularly cited in the literature and used widely. We also compared the performance of speech enhancement methods with other noise robust speech recognition methods like PMC to verify the usefulness of speech enhancement approaches in noise robust speech recognition systems.