Comparison of time & frequency filtering and cepstral-time matrix approaches in ASR

In current speech recognition systems, speech is represented by a 2-D sequence of parameters that model the temporal evolution of the spectral envelope of speech. Linear transformation or filtering along both time and frequency axes of that 2-D sequence are used to enhance the discriminative ability and robustness of speech parameters in the HMM pattern-matching formalism. In this paper, we compared two recently reported approaches which operate on the sequence of logarithmically compressed mel-scaled filter-bank energies: the first approach - TIFFING (TIme and Frequency FilterING) - applies FIR filters to that 2-D sequence along both axes, while the second one - CTM (Cepstral Time Matrix) - uses the DCT to compute a set of parameters in the 2-D transformed domain. They are compared in several ways: (1) analytically, using Fourier transformation, (2) statistically and (3) performing recognition tests with clean and noisy speech.