Reverberant Speech Recognition Based on Denoising Autoencoder

Denoising autoencoder is applied to reverberant speech recognition as a noise robust front-end to reconstruct clean speech spectrum from noisy input. In order to capture context effects of speech sounds, a window of multiple short-windowed spectral frames are concatenated to form a single input vector. Additionally, a combination of short and long-term spectra is investigated to properly handle long impulse response of reverberation while keeping necessary time resolution for speech recognition. Experiments are performed using the CENSREC-4 dataset that is designed as an evaluation framework for distant-talking speech recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed denoising autoencoder based front-end using the short-windowed spectra gives better results than conventional methods. By combining the long-term spectra, further improvement is obtained. The recognition accuracy by the proposed method using the short and long-term spectra is 97.0% for the open condition test set of the dataset, whereas it is 87.8% when a multi condition training based baseline is used. As a supplemental experiment, large vocabulary speech recognition is also performed and the effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed.