19,906 research outputs found
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
Adversarial Network Bottleneck Features for Noise Robust Speaker Verification
In this paper, we propose a noise robust bottleneck feature representation
which is generated by an adversarial network (AN). The AN includes two cascade
connected networks, an encoding network (EN) and a discriminative network (DN).
Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) of clean and noisy speech are used
as input to the EN and the output of the EN is used as the noise robust
feature. The EN and DN are trained in turn, namely, when training the DN, noise
types are selected as the training labels and when training the EN, all labels
are set as the same, i.e., the clean speech label, which aims to make the AN
features invariant to noise and thus achieve noise robustness. We evaluate the
performance of the proposed feature on a Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal
Background Model based speaker verification system, and make comparison to MFCC
features of speech enhanced by short-time spectral amplitude minimum mean
square error (STSA-MMSE) and deep neural network-based speech enhancement
(DNN-SE) methods. Experimental results on the RSR2015 database show that the
proposed AN bottleneck feature (AN-BN) dramatically outperforms the STSA-MMSE
and DNN-SE based MFCCs for different noise types and signal-to-noise ratios.
Furthermore, the AN-BN feature is able to improve the speaker verification
performance under the clean condition
Robust Speech Detection for Noisy Environments
This paper presents a robust voice activity detector (VAD) based on hidden Markov models (HMM) to improve speech recognition systems in stationary and non-stationary noise environments: inside motor vehicles (like cars or planes) or inside buildings close to high traffic places (like in a control tower for air traffic control (ATC)). In these environments, there is a high stationary noise level caused by vehicle motors and additionally, there could be people speaking at certain distance from the main speaker producing non-stationary noise. The VAD presented in this paper is characterized by a new front-end and a noise level adaptation process that increases significantly the VAD robustness for different signal to noise ratios (SNRs). The feature vector used by the VAD includes the most relevant Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), normalized log energy and delta log energy. The proposed VAD has been evaluated and compared to other well-known VADs using three databases containing different noise conditions: speech in clean environments (SNRs mayor que 20 dB), speech recorded in stationary noise environments (inside or close to motor vehicles), and finally, speech in non stationary environments (including noise from bars, television and far-field speakers). In the three cases, the detection error obtained with the proposed VAD is the lowest for all SNRs compared to AceroÂżs VAD (reference of this work) and other well-known VADs like AMR, AURORA or G729 annex b
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