Front-end for Far-field Speech Recognition based on Frequency Domain Linear Prediction

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems usually fail when they encounter speech from far-field microphone in reverberant environments. This is due to the application of short-term feature extraction techniques which do not compensate for the artifacts introduced by long room impulse responses. In this paper, we propose a front-end, based on Frequency Domain Linear Prediction (FDLP), that tries to remove reverberation artifacts present in far-field speech. Long temporal segments of far-field speech are analyzed in narrow frequency sub-bands to extract FDLP envelopes and residual signals. Filtering the residual signals with gain normalized inverse FDLP filters result in a set of sub-band signals which are synthesized to reconstruct the signal back. ASR experiments on far-field speech data processed by the proposed front-end show significant improvements (relative reduction of 30% in word error rate) compared to other robust feature extraction techniques.