A New Method for Speech Denoising and Robust Speech Recognition Using Probabilistic Models for Clean Speech and for Noise

We present a new method for speech denoising and robust speech recognition. Using the framework of probabilistic models allows us to integrate detailed speech models and models of realistic non-stationary noise signals in a principled manner. The framework transforms the denoising problem into a problem of Bayes-optimal signal estimation, producing minimum mean square error estimators of desired features of clean speech from noisy data. We describe a fast and efficient implementation of an algorithm that computes these estimators. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated in robust speech recognition experiments, using the Wall Street Journal speech corpus and Microsoft Whisper large-vocabulary continuous speech recognizer. Results show significantly lower word error rates than those under noisy-matched condition. In particular, when the denoising algorithm is applied to the noisy training data and subsequently the recognizer is retrained, very low error rates are obtained.