Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition Scheme with Histogram of Oriented Gradient Features

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for noise robust automatic speech recognition (ASR). The development of ASR techniques has made it possible to recognize isolated words with a near perfect word recognition rate. However, in a highly noisy environment, a distinct mismatch between the trained speech and the test data results in a significantly degraded word recognition rate (WRA). Unlike conventional ASR systems employing Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and a hidden Markov model (HMM), this study employ histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to ASR tasks to overcome this problem. Our proposed ASR system is less vulnerable to external interference noise, and achieves a higher WRA compared to a conventional ASR system equipped with MFCCs and an HMM. The performance of our proposed ASR system was evaluated using a phonetically balanced word (PBW) set mixed with artificially added noise.