EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Database Adaptation for ASR in Cross-Environmental Conditions in the SPEECON Project

Christophe Couvreur (1), Oren Gedge (2), Klaus Linhard (3), Shaunie Shammass (2), Johan Vantieghem (1)

(1) ScanSoft Belgium, Belgium
(2) Natural Speech Communication, Israel
(3) DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany

As part of the SPEECON corpora collection project, a software toolbox for transforming speech recordings made in a quiet environment with a close-talk microphone into far-talk noisy recordings has been developed. The toolbox allows speech recognizers to be trained for new acoustic environments without requiring an extensive data collection effort. This communication complements a previous article in which the adaptation toolbox was described in details and preliminary experimental results were presented. Detailed experimental results on a database specifically collected for testing purposes show the performance improvements that can be obtained with the database adaptation toolbox in various far-talk and noisy conditions. The Hebrew corpus collected for SPEECON is also used to assess how close a recognizer trained on simulated data can get to a recognizer trained on real far-talk noisy data.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Couvreur, Christophe / Gedge, Oren / Linhard, Klaus / Shammass, Shaunie / Vantieghem, Johan (2003): "Database adaptation for ASR in cross-environmental conditions in the SPEECON project", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1797-1800.