Noise and speaker compensation in the Log filter bank domain

TLDR: The elegance of the proposed approach is that given the speech data, the authors obtain directly MFCC features that are robust to noise and speaker-variations that show a significant relative improvement over baseline on Aurora-4 task.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a method to compensate for noise and speaker-variability directly in the Log filter-bank (FB) domain, so that MFCC features are robust to noise and speaker-variations. For noise-compensation, we use Vector Taylor Series (VTS) approach in the Log FB domain, and speaker-normalization is also done in the Log FB domain using Linear Vocal tract length (VTLN) matrices. For VTLN, optimal selection of warp-factor is done in Log FB domain using canonical GMM model, avoiding the two-pass approach needed by a HMM model. Further, this can be efficiently implemented using sufficient statistics obtained from the GMM and the FB-VTLN-matrices. The warp-factor selection using GMM can also be done in cepstral domain by applying DCT matrices without the usual approximations associated with conventional linear-VTLN. The elegance of the proposed approach is that given the speech data, we obtain directly MFCC features that are robust to noise and speaker-variations. The proposed approach, show a significant relative improvement of 31% over baseline on Aurora-4 task.