Microphone Array Processing for Robust Speech Recognition

Speech recognition performance degrades significantly in distant-talking environments, where the speech signals can be severely distorted by additive noise and reverberation. In such environments, the use of microphone arrays has been proposed as a means of improving the quality of captured speech signals. Currently, microphone-array-based speech recognition is performed in two independent stages: array processing and then recognition. Array processing algorithms designed for signal enhancement are applied in order to reduce the distortion in the speech waveform prior to feature extraction and recognition