Robust Speech Processing
Yariv Ephraim, George Mason University
March 3, 1998
Robust speech processing poses one of the greatest challenges to the speech research community. Speech recognizes and speech coders are particularly sensitive to channel mismatch. The primary goal of robust speech processing is to compensate for that mismatch. A related goal is to improve perceptual aspects of noisy speech signals for individuals with normal or impaired hearing. The complex nature of speech signals and the large number of adverse conditions make this problem particularly difficult. Important channel mismatches are related to additive noise, as encountered in wireless communications, and to convolutional noise, representing room reverberations. The seminar will review a number of research challenges and describe some recent results.
Yariv Ephraim received the D.Sc. in Electrical Enginering in 1984 from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He was a Research Scholar at Stanford University from 1984 through 1985, and a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1985 until 1993. He has been with George Mason University since 1991 where he currently is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research interests are statistical signal processing with applications to speech signals and array processing. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1994.