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

Assessment of Dereverberation Algorithms for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition Systems

Koen Eneman, Jacques Duchateau, Marc Moonen, Dirk van Compernolle, Hugo van Hamme

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

The performance of large vocabulary recognition systems, for instance in a dictation application, typically deteriorates severely when used in a reverberant environment. This can be partially avoided by adding a dereverberation algorithm as a speech signal preprocessing step. The purpose of this paper is to compare the effect of different speech dereverberation algorithms on the performance of a recognition system. Experiments were conducted on the Wall Street Journal dictation benchmark. Reverberation was added to the clean acoustic data in the benchmark both by simulation and by re-recording the data in a reverberant room. Moreover additive noise was added to investigate its effect on the dereverberation algorithms. We found that dereverberation based on a delay-and-sum beamforming algorithm has the best performance of the investigated algorithms.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Eneman, Koen / Duchateau, Jacques / Moonen, Marc / Compernolle, Dirk van / Hamme, Hugo van (2003): "Assessment of dereverberation algorithms for large vocabulary speech recognition systems", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 2689-2692.