• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.299-307
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• 2003

There have been many studies on speaker normalization which aims to minimize the effects of speaker's vocal tract length on the recognition performance of the speaker independent speech recognition system. In this paper, we propose a simple vector quantizer based linear warping speaker normalization method based on the observation that the vector quantizer can be successfully used for speaker verification. For this purpose, we firstly generate an optimal codebook which will be used as the basis of the speaker normalization, and then the warping factor of the unknown speaker will be extracted by comparing the feature vectors and the codebook. Finally, the extracted warping factor is used to linearly warp the Mel scale filter bank adopted in the course of MFCC calculation. To test the performance of the proposed method, a series of recognition experiments are conducted on discrete HMM with thirteen mono-syllabic Korean number utterances. The results showed that about 29% of word error rate can be reduced, and that the proposed warping factor extraction method is useful due to its simplicity compared to other line search warping methods.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.180-186
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• 2004

The presence of noise in speech signals degrades the performance of recognition systems in which there are mismatches between the training and test environments. To make a speech recognizer robust, it is necessary to compensate these mismatches. In this paper, we studied about an improvement of stochastic feature extraction based on band-SNR for robust speech recognition. At first, we proposed a modified version of the multi-band spectral subtraction (MSS) method which adjusts the subtraction level of noise spectrum according to band-SNR. In the proposed method referred as M-MSS, a noise normalization factor was newly introduced to finely control the over-estimation factor depending on the band-SNR. Also, we modified the architecture of the stochastic feature extraction (SFE) method. We could get a better performance when the spectral subtraction was applied in the power spectrum domain than in the mel-scale domain. This method is denoted as M-SFE. Last, we applied the M-MSS method to the modified stochastic feature extraction structure, which is denoted as the MMSS-MSFE method. The proposed methods were evaluated on isolated word recognition under various noise environments. The average error rates of the M-MSS, M-SFE, and MMSS-MSFE methods over the ordinary spectral subtraction (SS) method were reduced by 18.6%, 15.1%, and 33.9%, respectively. From these results, we can conclude that the proposed methods provide good candidates for robust feature extraction in the noisy speech recognition.