The domain of speech processing has come to the point where researchers and engineers are concerned with how speech technology can be applied to new products, and how this technology will transform our future. One important problem is to improve robustness of speech processing under adverse conditions, which is the subject of this book. Robust speech processing is a relatively new area which became a concern as technology started moving from laboratory to field applications. A method or an algorithm is robust if it can deal with a broad range of applications and adapt to unknown conditions. This text aims to address all of the fundamental problems and issues in the area. The book is divided into three parts. The first provides the background necessary for understanding the rest of the material. It also emphasizes the problems of speech production and perception in noise along with popular techniques used in speech analysis and automatic speech recognition. Part Two discusses the problems relevant to robustness in automatic speech recognition and speech-based applications.
It emphasizes intra- and inter-speaker variability as well as automatic speech recognition of Lombard, noisy and channel distorted speech. Finally, the third part covers recent advances in the field of robust automatic speech recognition.