Cepstrum third-order normalization method for noisy speech recognition

A new cepstrum normalization method is proposed which can be used to compensate for distortion caused by additive noise. Conventional methods only compensate for the deviation of the cepstral mean and/or variance. However, deviations of higher order moments also exist in noisy speech signals. The proposed method normalizes the cepstrum up to its third-order moment, providing closer probability density functions between clean and noisy cepstra than is possible using conventional methods. From the speaker-independent isolated-word recognition experiments, it is shown that the proposed method gives improved performance compared with that of conventional methods, especially in heavy noise environments.