Performance Analysis of a Class of Single Channel Speech Enhancement Algorithms for Automatic Speech Recognition

This paper analyzes the performance of various single channel speech enhancement algorithms when they are applied to automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems as a preprocessor. The functional modules of speech enhancement systems are first divided into four major modules such as a gain estimator, a noise power spectrum estimator, a priori signal to noise ratio (SNR) estimator, and a speech absence probability (SAP) estimator. We investigate the relationship between speech recognition accuracy and the roles of each module. Simulation results show that the Wiener filter outperforms other gain functions such as minimum mean square error-short time spectral amplitude (MMSE-STSA) and minimum mean square error-log spectral amplitude (MMSE-LSA) estimators when a perfect noise estimator is applied. When the performance of the noise estimator degrades, however, MMSE methods including the decision directed module to estimate a priori SNR and the SAP estimation module helps to improve the performance of the enhancement algorithm for speech recognition systems.