Related papers: Lightweight Front-end Enhancement for Robust ASR v…

For multi-channel speech recognition, speech enhancement techniques such as denoising or dereverberation are conventionally applied as a front-end processor. Deep learning-based front-ends using such techniques require aligned clean and…

It has been shown that the intelligibility of noisy speech can be improved by speech enhancement (SE) algorithms. However, monaural SE has not been established as an effective frontend for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in noisy…

This work proposes a novel support vector machine (SVM) based robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) front-end that operates on an ensemble of the subband components of high-dimensional acoustic waveforms. The key issues of selecting the…

We present a frontend for improving robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR), that jointly implements three modules within a single model: acoustic echo cancellation, speech enhancement, and speech separation. This is achieved by…

Speech enhancement (SE) aims to extract the clean waveform from noise-contaminated measurements to improve the speech quality and intelligibility. Although learning-based methods can perform much better than traditional counterparts, the…

Noise robustness is critical when applying automatic speech recognition (ASR) in real-world scenarios. One solution involves the used of speech enhancement (SE) models as the front end of ASR. However, neural network-based (NN-based) SE…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has reached a level of accuracy in recent years, that even outperforms humans in transcribing speech to text. Nevertheless, all current ASR approaches show a certain weakness against ambient noise. To…

Speech enhancement (SE) is usually required as a front end to improve the speech quality in noisy environments, while the enhanced speech might not be optimal for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems due to speech distortion. On the…

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), unlike conventional ASR, does not have modules to learn the semantic representation from speech encoder. Moreover, the higher frame-rate of speech representation prevents the model to learn the…

Self-supervised speech representation learning (speech SSL) has demonstrated the benefit of scale in learning rich representations for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with limited paired data, such as wav2vec 2.0. We investigate the…

In this work, we exploit speech enhancement for improving a recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) based ASR system. We employ a dense convolutional recurrent network (DCRN) for complex spectral mapping based speech enhancement, and…

We explore network sparsification strategies with the aim of compressing neural speech enhancement (SE) down to an optimal configuration for a new generation of low power microcontroller based neural accelerators (microNPU's). We examine…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems degrade significantly under noisy conditions. Recently, speech enhancement (SE) is introduced as front-end to reduce noise for ASR, but it also suppresses some important speech information, i.e.,…

Noise robustness is essential for deploying automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in real-world environments. One way to reduce the effect of noise interference is to employ a preprocessing module that conducts speech enhancement, and…

Discretized representations of speech signals are efficient alternatives to continuous features for various speech applications, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech language models. However, these representations, such…

Conventional deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement (SE) approaches aim to minimize the mean square error (MSE) between enhanced speech and clean reference. The MSE-optimized model may not directly improve the performance of an…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often make unrecoverable errors due to subsystem pruning (acoustic, language and pronunciation models); for example pruning words due to acoustics using short-term context, prior to rescoring with…

Self-supervised speech representation learning (SSL) has shown to be effective in various downstream tasks, but SSL models are usually large and slow. Model compression techniques such as pruning aim to reduce the model size and computation…

It is challenging to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance in noisy conditions with a single-channel speech enhancement (SE) front-end. This is generally attributed to the processing distortions caused by the nonlinear…

Using neural network based acoustic frontends for improving robustness of streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is challenging because of the causality constraints and the resulting distortion that the frontend processing…