"This E-book is a collection of articles that describe advances in speech recognition technology. Robustness in speech recognition refers to the need to maintain high speech recognition accuracy even when the quality of the input speech is degraded, or whe"

Robust Automatic Speech Recognition: A Bridge to Practical Applications establishes a solid foundation for automatic speech recognition that is robust against acoustic environmental distortion. It provides a thorough overview of classical and modern noise-and reverberation robust techniques that have been developed over the past thirty years, with an emphasis on practical methods that have been proven to be successful and which are likely to be further developed for future applications.The strengths and weaknesses of robustness-enhancing speech recognition techniques are carefully analyzed. The book covers noise-robust techniques designed for acoustic models which are based on both Gaussian mixture models and deep neural networks. In addition, a guide to selecting the best methods for practical applications is provided.The reader will: - Gain a unified, deep and systematic understanding of the state-of-the-art technologies for robust speech recognition - Learn the links and relationship between alternative technologies for robust speech recognition - Be able to use the technology analysis and categorization detailed in the book to guide future technology development - Be able to develop new noise-robust methods in the current era of deep learning for acoustic modeling in speech recognition - The first book that provides a comprehensive review on noise and reverberation robust speech recognition methods in the era of deep neural networks - Connects robust speech recognition techniques to machine learning paradigms with rigorous mathematical treatment - Provides elegant and structural ways to categorize and analyze noise-robust speech recognition techniques - Written by leading researchers who have been actively working on the subject matter in both industrial and academic organizations for many years

Foreword Looking back the past 30 years. we have seen steady progress made in the area of speech science and technology. I still remember the excitement in the late seventies when Texas Instruments came up with a toy named "Speak-and-Spell" which was based on a VLSI chip containing the state-of-the-art linear prediction synthesizer. This caused a speech technology fever among the electronics industry. Particularly. applications of automatic speech recognition were rigorously attempt ed by many companies. some of which were start-ups founded just for this purpose. Unfortunately. it did not take long before they realized that automatic speech rec ognition technology was not mature enough to satisfy the need of customers. The fever gradually faded away. In the meantime. constant efforts have been made by many researchers and engi neers to improve the automatic speech recognition technology. Hardware capabilities have advanced impressively since that time. In the past few years. we have been witnessing and experiencing the advent of the "Information Revolution." What might be called the second surge of interest to com mercialize speech technology as a natural interface for man-machine communication began in much better shape than the first one. With computers much more powerful and faster. many applications look realistic this time. However. there are still tremendous practical issues to be overcome in order for speech to be truly the most natural interface between humans and machines.

This book on Robust Speech Recognition and Understanding brings together many different aspects of the current research on automatic speech recognition and language understanding. The first four chapters address the task of voice activity detection which is considered an important issue for all speech recognition systems. The next chapters give several extensions to state-of-the-art HMM methods. Furthermore, a number of chapters particularly address the task of robust ASR under noisy conditions. Two chapters on the automatic recognition of a speaker's emotional state highlight the importance of natural speech understanding and interpretation in voice-driven systems. The last chapters of the book address the application of conversational systems on robots, as well as the autonomous acquisition of vocalization skills.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are finding increasing use in everyday life. Many of the commonplace environments where the systems are used are noisy, for example users calling up a voice search system from a busy cafeteria or a street. This can result in degraded speech recordings and adversely affect the performance of speech recognition systems. As the use of ASR systems increases, knowledge of the state-of-the-art in techniques to deal with such problems becomes critical to system and application engineers and researchers who work with or on ASR technologies. This book presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in techniques used to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems to these degrading external influences. Key features: Reviews all the main noise robust ASR approaches, including signal separation, voice activity detection, robust feature extraction, model compensation and adaptation, missing data techniques and recognition of reverberant speech. Acts as a timely exposition of the topic in light of more widespread use in the future of ASR technology in challenging environments. Addresses robustness issues and signal degradation which are both key requirements for practitioners of ASR. Includes contributions from top ASR researchers from leading research units in the field

This book is based on publications from the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in 2002. The workshop covered various aspects of devel- ment and evaluation of spoken multimodal dialogue systems and components with particular emphasis on mobile environments, and discussed the state-- the-art within this area. On the development side the major aspects addressed include speech recognition, dialogue management, multimodal output gene- tion, system architectures, full applications, and user interface issues. On the evaluation side primarily usability evaluation was addressed. A number of high quality papers from the workshop were selected to form the basis of this book. The volume is divided into three major parts which group together the ov- all aspects covered by the workshop. The selected papers have all been - tended, reviewed and improved after the workshop to form the backbone of the book. In addition, we have supplemented each of the three parts by an invited contribution intended to serve as an overview chapter.

This is the first book to provide a single complete reference on microphone arrays. Top researchers in this field contributed articles documenting the current state of the art in microphone array research, development and technological application.

The nature of handwriting in our society has significantly altered over the ages due to the introduction of new technologies such as computers and the World Wide Web. With increases in the amount of signature verification needs, state of the art internet and paper-based automated recognition methods are necessary. Pattern Recognition Technologies and Applications: Recent Advances provides cutting-edge pattern recognition techniques and applications. Written by world-renowned experts in their field, this easy to understand book is a must have for those seeking explanation in topics such as on- and offline handwriting and speech recognition, signature verification, and gender classification.

The term speech processing refers to the scientific discipline concerned with the analysis and processing of speech signals for getting the best benefit in various practical scenarios. These different practical scenarios correspond to a large variety of applications of speech processing research. Examples of some applications include enhancement, coding, synthesis, recognition and speaker recognition. A very rapid growth, particularly during the past ten years, has resulted due to the efforts of many leading scientists. The ideal aim is to develop algorithms for a certain task that maximize performance, are computationally feasible and are robust to a wide class of conditions. The purpose of this book is to provide a cohesive collection of articles that describe recent advances in various branches of speech processing. The main focus is in describing specific research directions through a detailed analysis and review of both the theoretical and practical settings. The intended audience includes graduate students who are embarking on speech research as well as the experienced researcher already working in the field. For graduate students taking a course, this book serves as a supplement to the course material. As the student focuses on a particular topic, the corresponding set of articles in this book will serve as an initiation through exposure to research issues and by providing an extensive reference list to commence a literature survey. Expe rienced researchers can utilize this book as a reference guide and can expand their horizons in this rather broad area.

This book covers the state-of-the-art in deep neural-network-based methods for noise robustness in distant speech recognition applications. It provides insights and detailed descriptions of some of the new concepts and key technologies in the field, including novel architectures for speech enhancement, microphone arrays, robust features, acoustic model adaptation, training data augmentation, and training criteria. The contributed chapters also include descriptions of real-world applications, benchmark tools and datasets widely used in the field. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners working in the field of speech processing and recognition who are interested in the latest deep learning techniques for noise robustness. It will also be of interest to graduate students in electrical engineering or computer science, who will find it a useful guide to this field of research.