ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2010

On the potential of channel selection for recognition of reverberated speech with multiple microphones

Martin Wolf, Climent Nadeu

The performance of ASR systems in a room environment with distant microphones is strongly affected by reverberation. As the degree of signal distortion varies among acoustic channels (i.e. microphones), the recognition accuracy can benefit from a proper channel selection. In this paper, we experimentally show that there exists a large margin for WER reduction by channel selection, and discuss several possible methods which do not require any a-priori classification. Moreover, by using a LVCSR task, a significant WER reduction is shown with a simple technique which uses a measure computed from the sub-band time envelope of the various microphone signals.