ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1995

Robust continuous speech recognition using a microphone array

D. Giuliani, M. Matassoni, M. Omologo, P. Svaizer

This paper focuses on the use of microphone arrays for speaker independent continuous speech recognition in real environment. An array of four omnidirectional microphones was placed at 1.5 m distance from the talker; given the array signals, a Time Delay Compensation (TDC) technique was applied to provide a beamformed signal, that is shown effective as input to a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based recognizer. The paper also refers to three enhancement/normalization techniques that are employed to obtain a better alignment between the new noisy conditions and the clean ones, under which the training was carried out. In particular, a phone HMM adaptation technique seems to be the most promising for developing a scenario of rapid speaker/environment/ channel adaptation of a realtime hands-free recognizer.