An Efferent-Inspired Auditory Model Front-End for Speech Recognition

In this paper, we investigate a closed-loop auditory model and explore its potential as a feature representation for speech recognition. The closed-loop representation consists of an auditory-based, efferent-inspired feedback mechanism that regulates the operating point of a filter bank, thus enabling it to dynamically adapt to changing background noise. With dynamic adaptation, the closed-loop representation demonstrates an ability to compensate for the effects of noise on speech, and generates a consistent feature representation for speech when contaminated by different kinds of noises. Our preliminary experimental results indicate that the efferent-inspired feedback mechanism enables the closed-loop auditory model to consistently improve word recognition accuracies, when compared with an open-loop representation, for mismatched training and test noise conditions in a connected digit recognition task.