A Novel Weighted Dynamic Time Warping for Light Weight Speaker-Dependent Speech Recognition in Noisy and Bad Recording Conditions

Lightweight speaker-dependent (SD) automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a promising solution for the problems of possibility of disclosing personal privacy and difficulty of obtaining training material for many seldom used English words and (often non-English) names. Dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm is the state-of-the-art algorithm for small foot-print SD ASR applications, which have limited storage space and small vocabulary. In our previous work, we have successfully developed two fast and accurate DTW variations for clean speech data. However, speech recognition in adverse conditions is still a big challenge. In order to improve recognition accuracy in noisy and bad recording conditions, such as too high or low recording volume, we introduce a novel weighted DTW method. This method defines a feature index for each time frame of training data, and then applies it to the core DTW process to tune the final alignment score. With extensive experiments on one representative SD dataset of three speakers' recordings, our method achieves better accuracy than DTW, where 0.5% relative reduction of error rate (RRER) on clean speech data and 7.5% RRER on noisy and bad recording speech data. To the best of our knowledge, our new weighted DTW is the first weighted DTW method specially designed for speech data in noisy and bad recording conditions.