Deep Learning for Environmentally Robust Speech Recognition: An Overview of Recent Developments

Eliminating the negative effect of non-stationary environmental noise is a long-standing research topic for automatic speech recognition that stills remains an important challenge. Data-driven supervised approaches, including ones based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as potential alternatives to traditional unsupervised approaches and with sufficient training, can alleviate the shortcomings of the unsupervised methods in various real-life acoustic environments. In this light, we review recently developed, representative deep learning approaches for tackling non-stationary additive and convolutional degradation of speech with the aim of providing guidelines for those involved in the development of environmentally robust speech recognition systems. We separately discuss single- and multi-channel techniques developed for the front-end and back-end of speech recognition systems, as well as joint front-end and back-end training frameworks

DC-image for real time compressed video matching

This chapter presents a suggested framework for video matching based on local features extracted from the DC-image of MPEG compressed videos, without full decompression. In addition, the relevant arguments and supporting evidences are discussed. Several local feature detectors will be examined to select the best for matching using the DC-image. Two experiments are carried to support the above. The first is comparing between the DC-image and I-frame, in terms of matching performance and computation complexity. The second experiment compares between using local features and global features regarding compressed video matching with respect to the DC-image. The results confirmed that the use of DC-image, despite its highly reduced size, it is promising as it produces higher matching precision, compared to the full I-frame. Also, SIFT, as a local feature, outperforms most of the standard global features. On the other hand, its computation complexity is relatively higher, but it is still within the real-time margin which leaves a space for further optimizations that can be done to improve this computation complexity

Word matching using single closed contours for indexing handwritten historical documents

Effective indexing is crucial for providing convenient access to scanned versions of large collections of historically valuable handwritten manuscripts. Since traditional handwriting recognizers based on optical character recognition (OCR) do not perform well on historical documents, recently a holistic word recognition approach has gained in popularity as an attractive and more straightforward solution (Lavrenko et al. in proc. document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL’04), pp. 278–287, 2004). Such techniques attempt to recognize words based on scalar and profile-based features extracted from whole word images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to holistic word recognition for historical handwritten manuscripts based on matching word contours instead of whole images or word profiles. The new method consists of robust extraction of closed word contours and the application of an elastic contour matching technique proposed originally for general shapes (Adamek and O’Connor in IEEE Trans Circuits Syst Video Technol 5:2004). We demonstrate that multiscale contour-based descriptors can effectively capture intrinsic word features avoiding any segmentation of words into smaller subunits. Our experiments show a recognition accuracy of 83%, which considerably exceeds the performance of other systems reported in the literature