Distant Speech Recognition (eBook)

A complete overview of distant automatic speech recognition

The performance of conventional Automatic Speech Recognition
(ASR) systems degrades dramatically as soon as the microphone is
moved away from the mouth of the speaker. This is due to a broad
variety of effects such as background noise, overlapping speech
from other speakers, and reverberation. While traditional ASR
systems underperform for speech captured with far-field sensors,
there are a number of novel techniques within the recognition
system as well as techniques developed in other areas of signal
processing that can mitigate the deleterious effects of noise and
reverberation, as well as separating speech from overlapping
speakers.

Distant Speech Recognitionpresents a contemporary and
comprehensive description of both theoretic abstraction and
practical issues inherent in the distant ASR problem.

Key Features:

* Covers the entire topic of distant ASR and offers practical
solutions to overcome the problems related to it

* Provides documentation and sample scripts to enable readers to
construct state-of-the-art distant speech recognition systems

* Gives relevant background information in acoustics and filter
techniques,

* Explains the extraction and enhancement of classification
relevant speech features

* Describes maximum likelihood as well as discriminative
parameter estimation, and maximum likelihood normalization
techniques

* Discusses the use of multi-microphone configurations for
speaker tracking and channel combination

* Presents several applications of the methods and technologies
described in this book

* Accompanying website with open source software and tools to
construct state-of-the-art distant speech recognition systems

This reference will be an invaluable resource for researchers,
developers, engineers and other professionals, as well as advanced
students in speech technology, signal processing, acoustics,
statistics and artificial intelligence fields.