On-Line Blind Channel Normalization for Noise-Robust Speech Recognition

Abstract

A new data-driven method for the design of a blind modulation frequency filter that suppresses the slow-varying noise components is proposed. The proposed method is based on the temporal local decorrelation of the feature vector sequence, and is done on an utterance-by-utterance basis. Although the conventional modulation frequency filtering approaches the same form regardless of the task and environment conditions, the proposed method can provide an adaptive modulation frequency filter that outperforms conventional methods for each utterance. In addition, the method ultimately performs channel normalization in a feature domain with applications to log-spectral parameters. The performance was evaluated by speaker-independent isolated-word recognition experiments under additive noise environments. The proposed method achieved outstanding improvement for speech recognition in environments with significant noise and was also effective in a range of feature representations.

Keywords

• Robust speech recognition;
• Blind channel normalization;
• Modulation frequency filtering