Uncertainty decoding for distributed speech recognition over error-prone networks

In this paper, we propose an enhanced error concealment strategy at the server side of a distributed speech recognition (DSR) system, which is fully compatible with the existing DSR standard. It is based on a Bayesian approach, where the a posteriori probability density of the error-free feature vector is computed, given all received feature vectors which are possibly corrupted by transmission errors. Rather than computing a point estimate, such as the MMSE estimate, and plugging it into the Bayesian decision rule, we employ uncertainty decoding, which results in an integration over the uncertainty in the feature domain. In a typical scenario the communication between the thin client, often a mobile device, and the recognition server spreads across heterogeneous networks. Both bit errors on circuit-switched links and lost data packets on IP connections are mitigated by our approach in a unified manner. The experiments reveal improved robustness both for small- and large-vocabulary recognition tasks.