Automatic speech recognition performance in different room acoustic environments with and without dereverberation preprocessing

The performance of recent dereverberation methods for reverberant speech preprocessing prior to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is compared for an extensive range of room and source-receiver configurations. It is shown that room acoustic parameters such as the clarity (C50) and the definition (D50) correlate well with the ASR results. When available, such room acoustic parameters can provide insight into reverberant speech ASR performance and potential improvement via dereverberation preprocessing. It is also shown that the application of a recent dereverberation method based on perceptual modelling can be used in the above context and achieve significant Phone Recognition (PR) improvement, especially under highly reverberant conditions.

► Phone recognition performance of recent dereverberation techniques is investigated for an extensive range of room and source-receiver configurations. ► Room acoustic parameters such as the clarity (C50) and the definition (D50) are shown to correlate well and can provide insight into reverberant speech ASR performance and potential improvement via dereverberation preprocessing. ► The application of a recent dereverberation method based on perceptual reverberation modelling can be used in the above context and achieve significant Phone Recognition improvements.