Abstract

We propose a novel approach for estimating a reverberation model for a robust recognizer according to [1], which is designed to allow distant-talking automatic speech recognition (ASR) in reverberant environments. Based on a few calibration utterances with known transcriptions recorded in the target environment, a maximum likelihood estimator is used to find the means and variances of the reverberation model. In contrast to [1] and to HMM training on artificially reverberated training data (e. g. [2]), measurements of room impulse responses become unnecessary, and the effort for training is greatly reduced. Simulations of a connected digit recognition task show that, in highly reverberant environments, the reverberation models estimated by the proposed approach achieve significantly higher recognition rates than HMMs trained on reverberant data. 1.

Citations