TR2015-094

Speech Enhancement with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks and its Application to Noise-Robust ASR

    •  Weninger, F.J., Erdogan, H., Watanabe, S., Vincent, E., Le Roux, J., Hershey, J.R., Schuller, B.W., "Speech Enhancement with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks and Its Application to Noise-Robust ASR", Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation Conference (LVA), DOI: 10.1007/​978-3-319-22482-4_11, August 2015, vol. 9237, pp. 91-99.
      BibTeX TR2015-094 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Weninger2015aug,
      • author = {Weninger, F.J. and Erdogan, H. and Watanabe, S. and Vincent, E. and {Le Roux}, J. and Hershey, J.R. and Schuller, B.W.},
      • title = {Speech Enhancement with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks and Its Application to Noise-Robust ASR},
      • booktitle = {Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation Conference (LVA)},
      • year = 2015,
      • volume = 9237,
      • pages = {91--99},
      • month = aug,
      • doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-22482-4_11},
      • isbn = {978-3-319-22482-4},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2015-094}
      • }
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  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Speech & Audio

Abstract:

We evaluate some recent developments in recurrent neural network (RNN) based speech enhancement in the light of noise-robust automatic speech recognition (ASR). The proposed framework is based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) RNNs which are discriminatively trained according to an optimal speech reconstruction objective. We demonstrate that LSTM speech enhancement, even when used 'naively' as front-end processing, delivers competitive results on the CHiME-2 speech recognition task. Furthermore, simple, feature-level fusion based extensions to the framework are proposed to improve the integration with the ASR back-end. These yield a best result of 13.76 % average word error rate, which is, to our knowledge, the best score to date.