Unsupervised modulation filter learning for noise-robust speech recognition

The modulation filtering approach to robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) is based on enhancing perceptually relevant regions of the modulation spectrum while suppressing the regions susceptible to noise. In this paper, a data- driven unsupervised modulation filter learning scheme is proposed using convolutional restricted Boltzmann machine. The initial filter is learned using the speech spectrogram while subsequent filters are learned using residual spectrograms. The modulation filtered spectrograms are used for ASR experiments on noisy and reverberant speech where these features provide significant improvements over other robust features. Furthermore, the application of the proposed method for semi- supervised learning is investigated. (C) 2017 Acoustical Society of America.