- Shinji Watanabe, S. Araki, M. Bacchiani, Reinhold Häb-Umbach, M. Seltzer. 2019. Introduction to the Issue on Far-Field Speech Processing in the Era of Deep Learning: Speech Enhancement, Separation, and Recognition. Abstract: FAR-FIELD speech processing has become an active field of research due to recent scientific advancements and its widespread use in commercial products. This field of research deals with speech enhancement and recognition using one or more microphones placed at a distance from one or more speakers. Although the topic has been studied for a long time, recent successful applications starting with the Amazon Echo and challenge activities including CHiME and REVERB projects greatly accelerated progress in this field. Concurrently, deep learning has created a new paradigm that has led to major breakthroughs both in front-end signal enhancement, extraction, and separation, as well as in back-end automatic speech recognition (ASR). Furthermore, more deep learning provides a means of jointly optimizing all components of far-field speech processing in an end-to-end fashion. This special issue is a forum to gather the latest findings in this very active field of research. The special issue is highly relevant to the audio and acoustics, speech and language, and machine learning for signal processing communities.
