A study of adaptive enhancement methods for improved distant speech recognition

Automatic speech recognition systems trained on speech data recorded by microphones placed close to the speaker tend to perform poorly on speech recorded by microphones placed farther away from the speaker due to reverberation effects and background noise. I designed and implemented a variety of machine learning models to improve distant speech recognition performance by adaptively enhancing incoming speech to appear as if it was recorded in a close-talking environment, regardless of whether it was originally recorded in a close-talking or distant environment. These were evaluated by passing the enhanced speech to acoustic models trained on only close-talking speech and comparing error rates to those achieved without speech enhancement. Experiments conducted on the AMI, TIMIT and TED-LIUM datasets indicate that decreases in error rate on distant speech of up to 33% relative can be achieved by these with only minor increases (1% relative) on clean speech.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Titus, Andrew Richard

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James Glass and Hao Tang.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119706

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119706