Improving Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition with Single-Channel Time-Domain Enhancement Network
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With the advent of deep learning, research on noise-robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) has progressed rapidly. However, ASR performance in noisy conditions of single-channel systems remains unsatisfactory. Indeed, most single-channel speech enhancement (SE) methods (denoising) have brought only limited performance gains over state-of-the-art ASR back-end trained on multi-condition training data. Recently, there has been much research on neural network-based SE methods working in the time-domain showing levels of performance never attained before. However, it has not been established whether the high enhancement performance achieved by such time-domain approaches could be translated into ASR. In this paper, we show that a single-channel time-domain denoising approach can significantly improve ASR performance, providing more than 30 % relative word error reduction over a strong ASR back-end on the real evaluation data of the single-channel track of the CHiME-4 dataset. These positive results demonstrate that single-channel noise reduction can still improve ASR performance, which should open the door to more research in that direction.
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The quality of ASR in poor acoustic environments has greatly improved, e.g. accuracy in noisy environments.
“The quality of ASR in poor acoustic environments has greatly improved, e.g. the accuracy in noisy environments [Kinoshita et al. 2020].”
From Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions (2023) · cites this paper as Kinoshita et al. 2020
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Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions
Kuhn, K., Kersken, V., Reuter, B., Egger, N., & Zimmermann, G. (2023) · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing · doi:10.1145/3636513 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
“The quality of ASR in poor acoustic environments has greatly improved, e.g. the accuracy in noisy environments [Kinoshita et al. 2020].”
BackgroundHow Might We Create Better Benchmarks for Speech Recognition?
Aksënova, A., van Esch, D., Flynn, J., & Golik, P. (2021) · Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Benchmarking: Past, Present and Future · doi:10.18653/v1/2021.bppf-1.4 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
- Authors
- Kinoshita, K., Ochiai, T., Delcroix, M., & Nakatani, T.
- Affiliations
- NTT (Japan) (JP)
- Venue
- ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2020-05
- Pages
- 7009-7013
- ISSN
- 1520-6149 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3015312544
- Cited by
- 104
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 5
- FWCI
- 10.16
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image and Signal Denoising Methods
- Keywords
- noise-robust speech recognition, single-channel speech enhancement, speech recognition, CHiME-4, word error rate reduction, noisy speech
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