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