Robust speech recognition method based on discriminative environment feature extraction

Abstract

It is an effective approach to learn the influence of environmental parameters, such as additive noise and channel distortions, from training data for robust speech recognition. Most of the previous methods are based on maximum likelihood estimation criterion. However, these methods do not lead to a minimum error rate result. In this paper, a novel discriminative learning method of environmental parameters, which is based on Minimum Classification Error (MCE) criterion, is proposed. In the method, a simple classifier and the Generalized Probabilistic Descent (GPD) algorithm are adopted to iteratively learn the envirnnmental parameters. Consequently, the clean speech features are estimated from the noisy speech features with the estimated environmental parameters, and then the estimations of clean speech features are utilized in the back-end HMM classifier. Experiments show that the best error rate reduction of 32.1% is obtained, tested on a task of 18 isolated confusion Korean words, relative to aconventional HMM system.