Go To Program 108 Towards a Better Understanding of the Effect of Reverberation on Speech Recognition Performance Armin Sehr 1 Emanuel Habets 2 Roland Maas 1 Walter Kellermann 1 1 Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany 2 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom In order to tailor dereverberation approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, it is important to thoroughly understand the effect of reverberation on ASR performance. In this work, the effect is analyzed by varying the shape of the room impulse response (RIR) using two design parameters that are useful for defining the target response of typical dereverberation algorithms. The parameters determine the amount of attenuation of the coefficients that correspond to reflections arriving with at least a delay of T after the direct-path component. By convolving clean speech signals with the modified RIRs, ideal late-reverberation suppression is simulated. By varying the level of attenuation A and the delay T, the influence of these design parameters on the recognition rates is investigated. Thus, guidelines for adjusting dereverberation algorithms to ASR systems are deduced. View pdf