Enhancing the magnitude spectrum of speech features for robust speech recognition

In this article, we present an effective compensation scheme to improve noise robustness for the spectra of speech signals. In this compensation scheme, called magnitude spectrum enhancement (MSE), a voice activity detection (VAD) process is performed on the frame sequence of the utterance. The magnitude spectra of non-speech frames are then reduced while those of speech frames are amplified. In experiments conducted on the Aurora-2 noisy digits database, MSE achieves an error reduction rate of nearly 42% relative to baseline processing. This method outperforms well-known spectral-domain speech enhancement techniques, including spectral subtraction (SS) and Wiener filtering (WF). In addition, the proposed MSE can be integrated with cepstral-domain robustness methods, such as mean and variance normalization (MVN) and histogram normalization (HEQ), to achieve further improvements in recognition accuracy under noise-corrupted environments.