Multichannel signal separation for cocktail party speech recognition: a dynamic recurrent network

Abstract

This paper addresses a method of multichannel signal separation (MSS) with its application to cocktail party speech recognition. First, we present a fundamental principle for multichannel signal separation which uses the spatial independence of located sources as well as the temporal dependence of speech signals. Second, for practical implementation of the signal separation filter, we consider a dynamic recurrent network and develop a simple new learning algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of word recognition error rate (WER) in a large speech recognition experiment. The results show that our proposed method dramatically improves the word recognition performance in the case of two simultaneous speech inputs, and that a timing effect is involved in the segregation process. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.