Title
How bad are artifacts?: Analyzing the impact of speech enhancement errors on ASR
Abstract
It is challenging to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance in noisy conditions with single-channel speech enhancement (SE). In this paper, we investigate the causes of ASR performance degradation by decomposing the SE errors using orthogonal projection-based decomposition (OPD). OPD decomposes the SE errors into noise and artifact components. The artifact component is defined as the SE error signal that cannot be represented as a linear combination of speech and noise sources. We propose manually scaling the error components to analyze their impact on ASR. We experimentally identify the artifact component as the main cause of performance degradation, and we find that mitigating the artifact can greatly improve ASR performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the simple observation adding (OA) technique (i.e., adding a scaled version of the observed signal to the enhanced speech) can monotonically increase the signal-to-artifact ratio under a mild condition. Accordingly, we experimentally confirm that OA improves ASR performance for both simulated and real recordings. The findings of this paper provide a better understanding of the influence of SE errors on ASR and open the door to future research on novel approaches for designing effective single-channel SE front-ends for ASR.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.21437/INTERSPEECH.2022-318
Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kazuma Iwamoto100.34
Tsubasa Ochiai201.01
Marc Delcroix369962.07
Rintaro Ikeshita400.34
Hiroshi Sato523.76
Shoko Araki61726158.79
Shigeru Katagiri7850114.01