An analytic derivation of a phase-sensitive observation model for noise robust speech recognition

TLDR: An analytic derivation of the moments of the phase factor between clean speech and noise cepstral or log-mel-spectral feature vectors is presented, leading to significant improvements in word accuracy on the AURORA2 database.

Abstract: In this paper we present an analytic derivation of the moments of the phase factor between clean speech and noise cepstral or log-mel-spectral feature vectors. The development shows, among others, that the probability density of the phase factor is of sub-Gaussian nature and that it is independent of the noise type and the signal-to-noise ratio, however dependent on the mel filter bank index. Further we show how to compute the contribution of the phase factor to both the mean and the variance of the noisy speech observation likelihood, which relates the speech and noise feature vectors to those of noisy speech. The resulting phase-sensitive observation model is then used in model-based speech feature enhancement, leading to significant improvements in word accuracy on the AURORA2 database. Index Terms: model-based feature enhancement, phasesensitive observation model, phase factor distribution