Deep Xi as a Front-End for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition
This work addresses improving speech recognition robustness in noisy environments, presenting an incremental advancement over current deep learning front-ends.
The paper tackles robust automatic speech recognition by evaluating Deep Xi as a front-end for speech enhancement, showing it achieves a lower word error rate than existing masking- and mapping-based methods across various noise conditions.
Current front-ends for robust automatic speech recognition(ASR) include masking- and mapping-based deep learning approaches to speech enhancement. A recently proposed deep learning approach toa prioriSNR estimation, called DeepXi, was able to produce enhanced speech at a higher quality and intelligibility than current masking- and mapping-based approaches. Motivated by this, we investigate Deep Xi as a front-end for robust ASR. Deep Xi is evaluated using real-world non-stationary and coloured noise sources at multiple SNR levels. Our experimental investigation shows that DeepXi as a front-end is able to produce a lower word error rate than recent masking- and mapping-based deep learning front-ends. The results presented in this work show that Deep Xi is a viable front-end, and is able to significantly increase the robustness of an ASR system. Availability: Deep Xi is available at:https://github.com/anicolson/DeepXi