Robust AM-FM Features for Speech Recognition

In this letter, a nonlinear AM-FM speech model is used to extract robust features for speech recognition. The proposed features measure the amount of amplitude and frequency modulation that exists in speech resonances and attempt to model aspects of the speech acoustic information that the commonly used linear source-filter model fails to capture. The robustness and discriminability of the AM-FM features is investigated in combination with mel cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs). It is shown that these hybrid features perform well in the presence of noise, both in terms of phoneme-discrimination (J-measure) and in terms of speech recognition performance in several different tasks. Average relative error rate reduction up to 11% for clean and 46% for mismatched noisy conditions is achieved when AM-FM features are combined with MFCCs.