Robust recognition of noisy speech using speech enhancement

In this paper, a robust speech recognition system in the presence of additive background noise is studied. We adopt speech enhancement as the front-end processing module to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the input noisy speech for recognition in the latter stage. Three different speech enhancement algorithms were tested on six types of additive noises. Experimental results show that the cascading of the speech enhancer and a hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech recognizer can significantly improve recognition accuracy in noisy environments.