Spectral estimation using a log-distance error criterion applied to speech recognition

A novel algorithm is presented for the estimation of a signal in noise. The distortion criterion used is based on the distance between log spectra. In many signal-processing applications, such as speech recognition, log spectra are much closer to the parameters used in a discriminator than power spectra. Therefore, it is believed that this spectral estimation technique should lead to better results than previously developed techniques such as spectral subtraction. The present technique performed better than spectral subtraction in noise immunity experiments on the IBM isolated word speech-recognition system, although at the expense of additional computational requirements