Hilbert envelope based features for far-field speech recognition

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, trained on speech signals from close-talking microphones, generally fail in recognizing far-field speech. In this paper, we present a Hilbert Envelope based feature extraction technique to alleviate the artifacts introduced by room reverberations. The proposed technique is based on modeling temporal envelopes of the speech signal in narrow sub-bands using Frequency Domain Linear Prediction (FDLP). ASR experiments on far-field speech using the proposed FDLP features show significant performance improvements when compared to other robust feature extraction techniques (average relative improvement of 43 % in word error rate). © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.