Class-Based Histogram Equalization for Robust Speech Recognition

A new class-based histogram equalization method is proposed for robust speech recognition. The proposed method aims at not only compensating the acoustic mismatch between training and test environments, but also at reducing the discrepancy between the phonetic distributions of training and test speech data. The algorithm utilizes multiple class-specific reference and test cumulative distribution functions, classifies the noisy test features into their corresponding classes, and equalizes the features by using their corresponding class-specific reference and test distributions. Experiments on the Aurora 2 database proved the effectiveness of the proposed method by reducing relative errors by 18.74%, 17.52%, and 23.45% over the conventional histogram equalization method and by 59.43%, 66.00%, and 50.50% over mel-cepstral-based features for test sets A, B, and C, respectively.