Orthogonalized distinctive phonetic feature extraction for noise-robust automatic speech recognition

In this paper, we propose a noise-robust automatic speech recognition system that uses orthogonalized distinctive phonetic features (DPFs) as input of HMM with diagonal covariance. In an orthogonalized DPF extraction stage, first, a speech signal is converted to acoustic features composed of local features (LFs) and DeltaP, then a multilayer neural network (MLN) with 15 x 3 output units composed of context-dependent DPFs of a preceding context DPF vector, a current DPF vector, and a following context DPF vector maps the LFs to DPFs. Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) is then applied to orthogonalize each DPF vector in the context-dependent DPFs, using orthogonal bases calculated from a DPF vector that represents 38 Japanese phonemes. Each orthogonalized DPF vector is finally decor-related one another by using Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure. related one another by using Gram In experiments, after evaluating the parameters of the MLN input and output units in the DPF extractor. the orthogonalized DPFs are compared with original DPFs. The orthogonalized DPFs are then evaluated in comparison with a standard parameter set of MFCCs and dynamic features. Next, noise robustness is tested using four types of additive noise. The experimental results show that the use of the proposed orthogonalized DPFs can significantly reduce the error rate in an isolated spoken-word recognition task both with clean speech and with speech contaminated by additive noise. Furthermore, we achieved significant improvements when combining the orthogonalized DPFs with conventional static MFCCs and DeltaP.