Speech enhancement via combination of Wiener filter and blind source separation

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) often fails in acoustically noisy environments. Aimed to improve speech recognition scores of an ASR in a real-life like acoustical environment, a speech pre-processing system is proposed in this paper, which consists of several stages: First, a convolutive blind source separation (BSS) is applied to the spectrogram of the signals that are pre-processed by binaural Wiener filtering (BWF). Secondly, the target speech is detected by an ASR system recognition rate based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), the improvement signal-to-noise ratio (ISNR) and the speech recognition rates of the output signals were calculated using the signal corpus of the CHiME database. The results show an improvement in SIR and ISNR, but no obvious improvement of speech recognition scores. Improvements for future research are suggested. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.