Robust Automatic Speech Recognition: A Bridge to Practical Applications establishes a solid foundation for automatic speech recognition that is robust against acoustic environmental distortion. It provides a thorough overview of classical and modern noise-and reverberation robust techniques that have been developed over the past thirty years, with an emphasis on practical methods that have been proven to be successful and which are likely to be further developed for future applications.The strengths and weaknesses of robustness-enhancing speech recognition techniques are carefully analyzed. The book covers noise-robust techniques designed for acoustic models which are based on both Gaussian mixture models and deep neural networks. In addition, a guide to selecting the best methods for practical applications is provided.The reader will: - Gain a unified, deep and systematic understanding of the state-of-the-art technologies for robust speech recognition - Learn the links and relationship between alternative technologies for robust speech recognition - Be able to use the technology analysis and categorization detailed in the book to guide future technology development - Be able to develop new noise-robust methods in the current era of deep learning for acoustic modeling in speech recognition - The first book that provides a comprehensive review on noise and reverberation robust speech recognition methods in the era of deep neural networks - Connects robust speech recognition techniques to machine learning paradigms with rigorous mathematical treatment - Provides elegant and structural ways to categorize and analyze noise-robust speech recognition techniques - Written by leading researchers who have been actively working on the subject matter in both industrial and academic organizations for many years

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are finding increasing use in everyday life. Many of the commonplace environments where the systems are used are noisy, for example users calling up a voice search system from a busy cafeteria or a street. This can result in degraded speech recordings and adversely affect the performance of speech recognition systems. As the use of ASR systems increases, knowledge of the state-of-the-art in techniques to deal with such problems becomes critical to system and application engineers and researchers who work with or on ASR technologies. This book presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in techniques used to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems to these degrading external influences. Key features: Reviews all the main noise robust ASR approaches, including signal separation, voice activity detection, robust feature extraction, model compensation and adaptation, missing data techniques and recognition of reverberant speech. Acts as a timely exposition of the topic in light of more widespread use in the future of ASR technology in challenging environments. Addresses robustness issues and signal degradation which are both key requirements for practitioners of ASR. Includes contributions from top ASR researchers from leading research units in the field

This book covers the state-of-the-art in deep neural-network-based methods for noise robustness in distant speech recognition applications. It provides insights and detailed descriptions of some of the new concepts and key technologies in the field, including novel architectures for speech enhancement, microphone arrays, robust features, acoustic model adaptation, training data augmentation, and training criteria. The contributed chapters also include descriptions of real-world applications, benchmark tools and datasets widely used in the field. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners working in the field of speech processing and recognition who are interested in the latest deep learning techniques for noise robustness. It will also be of interest to graduate students in electrical engineering or computer science, who will find it a useful guide to this field of research.

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its reliability to selectively focus on those segments and features that are most reliable for recognition. This book presents the state of the art in recognition in the presence of uncertainty, offering examples that utilize uncertainty information for noise robustness, reverberation robustness, simultaneous recognition of multiple speech signals, and audiovisual speech recognition. The book is appropriate for scientists and researchers in the field of speech recognition who will find an overview of the state of the art in robust speech recognition, professionals working in speech recognition who will find strategies for improving recognition results in various conditions of mismatch, and lecturers of advanced courses on speech processing or speech recognition who will find a reference and a comprehensive introduction to the field. The book assumes an understanding of the fundamentals of speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models.

This book on Robust Speech Recognition and Understanding brings together many different aspects of the current research on automatic speech recognition and language understanding. The first four chapters address the task of voice activity detection which is considered an important issue for all speech recognition systems. The next chapters give several extensions to state-of-the-art HMM methods. Furthermore, a number of chapters particularly address the task of robust ASR under noisy conditions. Two chapters on the automatic recognition of a speaker's emotional state highlight the importance of natural speech understanding and interpretation in voice-driven systems. The last chapters of the book address the application of conversational systems on robots, as well as the autonomous acquisition of vocalization skills.

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.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Engineering Applications, WEA 2021, held in Medellín, Colombia, in October 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held in a hybrid mode. The 33 revised full papers and 11 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 127 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: computational intelligence; bioengineering; Internet of Things (IoT); optimization and operations research; engineering applications.