On properties of modulation spectrum for robust automatic speech recognition

We report on the effect of band-pass filtering of the time trajectories of spectral envelopes on speech recognition. Several types of filter (linear-phase FIR, DCT, and DFT) are studied. Results indicate the relative importance of different components of the modulation spectrum of speech for ASR. General conclusions are: (1) most of the useful linguistic information is in modulation frequency components from the range between 1 and 16 Hz, with the dominant component at around 4 Hz, (2) it is important to preserve the phase information in the modulation frequency domain, (3) the features which include components at around 4 Hz in the modulation spectrum outperform the conventional delta features, (4) the features which represent the several modulation frequency bands with appropriate center frequency and bandwidth increase recognition performance.