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Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Computer Science; Associate Director, Information Networking Institute
rms@cs.cmu.edu

412-268-2535
412-268-3890 (fax)
PH B24

Secretary:
Carol Patterson
carol@ece.cmu.edu
412-268-7286

Automatic speech recognition, auditory perception, signal processing, communications, and biomedical instrumentation.

S.B. 1970, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; S.M. 1972, University of California at Berkeley; Ph.D. 1976, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Carnegie Mellon,
1977-present
Richard M. Stern

Automatic Speech Recognition
Most current speech recognition systems do not yet perform well in difficult acoustical environments, or in different environments from the ones in which they had been trained. This research is concerned with improving the robustness of SPHINX, Carnegie Mellon’s large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition system, with respect to acoustical distortion resulting from sources such as background noise, competing talkers, change of microphone, and room reverberation. Several different strategies are being used to address these problems. These include: improved noise cancellation and speech normalization methods, the use of representations of the speech waveform that are based on the processing of sounds by the human auditory system, and the use of array-processing techniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the speech that is input to the system.
Signal Processing in the Auditory System
This research includes both psycho-acoustical measurements to determine how we hear complex sounds, and the development of mathematical models that use optimal communication theory to relate the results of these experiments to the neural coding of sounds by the auditory system. Much of this work has been concerned with the localization of sound and other aspects of binaural perception.

Representative Publications
J. P. Moreno, B. Raj and R.M. Stern, "Data-Driven Environmental Compensation for Speech Recognition: A Unified Approach," Speech Communication, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 267-285, 1998.

R.M. Stern, A. Acero, F.-H. Liu and Y. Ohshima, "Signal Processing for Robust Speech Recognition," Speech Recognition, C.-H. Lee and F. Soong, editors, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, Mass., pp. 351-378, 1996.

R.M. Stern and C. Trahiotis, "Models of Binaural Interaction," Hearing, B.C.J. Moore, editor, Academic Press, New York, N.Y., vol. 6, pp. 347-386, 1994.