A robust Viterbi algorithm against impulsive noise with application to speech recognition

The Viterbi algorithm has been successfully applied to different pattern recognition and communication tasks. However, if some observations are corrupted by unknown impulsives noise which are not accounted for by the distortion measures, recognition performance can degrade significantly. In this paper, we propose a robust Viterbi algorithm to handle short impulsive noises with unknown characteristics by means of joint decoding and detection during the Viterbi search. To make the algorithm applicable to different noisy conditions with varying amounts of impulsive noise, we further proposed an approach to efficiently estimate the number of corruptions. -We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed robust algorithms using spoken digit recognition experiments under two different impulsive noise environments. Under random Gaussian replacement noise, the proposed algorithm reduced digit error by more than 65%. Under the GSM network environment in which lost frames are replaced by interpolated neighboring frames, the robust algorithm reduced digit error by 20%. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm does not degrade performance when impulsive noise is not present.