An error-protected speech recognition system for wireless communications

Future wireless multimedia terminals will have a variety of applications that require speech recognition capabilities. We consider a robust distributed speech recognition system where representative parameters of the speech signal are extracted at the wireless terminal and transmitted to a centralized automatic speech recognition (ASR) server. We propose two unequal error protection schemes for the ASR bit stream and demonstrate the satisfactory performance of these schemes for typical wireless cellular channels. In addition, a "soft-feature" error concealment strategy is introduced at the ASR server that uses "soft-outputs" from the channel decoder to compute the marginal distribution of only the reliable features during likelihood computation at the speech recognizer. This soft-feature error concealment technique reduces the ASR error rate by more than a factor of 2.5 for certain channels. Also considered is a channel decoding technique with source information that improves ASR performance.