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Stream fusion for multi-stream automatic speech recognition

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Abstract

Multi-stream automatic speech recognition (MS-ASR) has been confirmed to boost the recognition performance in noisy conditions. In this system, the generation and the fusion of the streams are the essential parts and need to be designed in such a way to reduce the effect of noise on the final decision. This paper shows how to improve the performance of the MS-ASR by targeting two questions; (1) How many streams are to be combined, and (2) how to combine them. First, we propose a novel approach based on stream reliability to select the number of streams to be fused. Second, a fusion method based on Parallel Hidden Markov Models is introduced. Applying the method on two datasets (TIMIT and RATS) with different noises, we show an improvement of MS-ASR.

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Notes

  1. We used the Quicknet toolbox developed at the International Computer Science Institute (http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/qn.html).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Professor Hynek Hermansky for his valuable comments.

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Correspondence to Hesam Sagha.

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Sagha, H., Li, F., Variani, E. et al. Stream fusion for multi-stream automatic speech recognition. Int J Speech Technol 19, 669–675 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-016-9357-1

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