Spectrum enhancement with sparse coding for robust speech recognition

Recently, a trend in speech recognition is to introduce sparse coding for noise robustness. Although several methods have been proposed, the performance of sparse coding in speech denoising is not so optimistic. One assumption with sparse coding is that the representation of speech over the speech dictionary is sparse, while that of the noise is dense. This assumption is obviously not sustained in the speech denoising scenario. Many noises are also sparse over the speech dictionary. In such a condition, the representation of noisy speech still contains noise components, resulting in degraded performance. To solve this problem, we first analyze the assumption of sparse coding and then propose a novel method to enhance speech spectrum. This method first finds out the atoms which represent the noise sparsely, and then selectively ignores them in the reconstruction of speech to reduce the residual noise. Speech features are then extracted from the enhanced spectrum for speech recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the noise robustness of a speech recognition system substantially. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.