Cepstral statistics compensation and normalization using online pseudo stereo codebooks for robust speech recognition in additive noise environments

This paper proposes several cepstral statistics compensation and normalization algorithms which alleviate the effect of additive noise on cepstral features for speech recognition. The algorithms are simple yet efficient noise reduction techniques that use online-constructed pseudo-stereo codebooks to evaluate the statistics in both clean and noisy environments. The process yields transformations for both clean speech cepstra and noise-corrupted speech cepstra, or for noise-corrupted speech cepstra only, so that the statistics of the transformed speech cepstra are similar for both environments. Experimental results show that these codebook-based algorithms can provide significant performance gains compared to results obtained by using conventional utterance-based normalization approaches. The proposed codebook-based cesptral mean and variance normalization (C-CMVN), linear least squares (LLS) and quadratic least squares (QLS) outperform utterance-based CMVN (U-CMVN) by 26.03%, 22.72% and 27.48%, respectively, in relative word error rate reduction for experiments conducted on Test Set A of the Aurora-2 digit database.