Convention Paper
Evaluating the Influence of Source Separation Methods in Robust Automatic Speech Recognition with a Specific Cocktail-Party Training
AES Convention 132 · Paper 8635 · April 2012
Abstract
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) allows a computer to identify
the words that a person speaks into a microphone and convert it to
written text. One of the most challenging situations for ASR is
the cocktail-party environment. Although source separation methods
have already been investigated to deal with this problem, the
separation process is not perfect and the resulting artifacts pose
an additional problem to ASR performance in case of using
separation methods based on time-frequency masks. Recently, the
authors proposed a specific training method to deal with
simultaneous speech situations in practical ASR systems. In this
paper, we study how the speech recognition performance is affected
by selecting different combinations of separation algorithms both
at the training and test stages of the ASR system under different
acoustic conditions. The results show that, while different
separation methods produce different types of artifacts, the
overall performance of the method is always increased when using
any cocktail-party training.
