Very Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Robust Speech Recognition

This paper describes the extension and optimization of our previous work on very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for effective recognition of noisy speech in the Aurora 4 task. The appropriate number of convolutional layers, the sizes of the filters, pooling operations and input feature maps are all modified: the filter and pooling sizes are reduced and dimensions of input feature maps are extended to allow adding more convolutional layers. Furthermore appropriate input padding and input feature map selection strategies are developed. In addition, an adaptation framework using joint training of very deep CNN with auxiliary features i-vector and fMLLR features is developed. These modifications give substantial word error rate reductions over the standard CNN used as baseline. Finally the very deep CNN is combined with an LSTM-RNN acoustic model and it is shown that state-level weighted log likelihood score combination in a joint acoustic model decoding scheme is very effective. On the Aurora 4 task, the very deep CNN achieves a WER of 8.81%, further 7.99% with auxiliary feature joint training, and 7.09% with LSTM-RNN joint decoding.Comment: accepted by SLT 201

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

Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing

Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references, and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis). Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure

A Convolutional Neural Network model based on Neutrosophy for Noisy Speech Recognition

Convolutional neural networks are sensitive to unknown noisy condition in the test phase and so their performance degrades for the noisy data classification task including noisy speech recognition. In this research, a new convolutional neural network (CNN) model with data uncertainty handling; referred as NCNN (Neutrosophic Convolutional Neural Network); is proposed for classification task. Here, speech signals are used as input data and their noise is modeled as uncertainty. In this task, using speech spectrogram, a definition of uncertainty is proposed in neutrosophic (NS) domain. Uncertainty is computed for each Time-frequency point of speech spectrogram as like a pixel. Therefore, uncertainty matrix with the same size of spectrogram is created in NS domain. In the next step, a two parallel paths CNN classification model is proposed. Speech spectrogram is used as input of the first path and uncertainty matrix for the second path. The outputs of two paths are combined to compute the final output of the classifier. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, it has been compared with conventional CNN on the isolated words of Aurora2 dataset. The proposed method achieves the average accuracy of 85.96 in noisy train data. It is more robust against Car, Airport and Subway noises with accuracies 90, 88 and 81 in test sets A, B and C, respectively. Results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional CNN with the improvement of 6, 5 and 2 percentage in test set A, test set B and test sets C, respectively. It means that the proposed method is more robust against noisy data and handle these data effectively.Comment: International conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IPRIA 2019