Patent ID: 7319954

Claim:
An apparatus for compensating for interference in speech recognition, said apparatus comprising: a first input device which obtains an initial speech signal, wherein said first input device is adapted to obtain the initial speech signal in an environment where noise corresponding to at least one interfering signal is present and said noise is not linearly time invariant coupled to said initial speech signal; a second input device which obtains at least one interfering signal, wherein said at least one interfering signal is not statistically independent of said initial speech signal, and further wherein said second input device is adapted to obtain solely the at least one interfering signal; a normalizing arrangement which reconciles the initial speech signal and at least one interfering signal with one another to produce a final speech signal, wherein said reconciliation can be done in real-time and further wherein the final speech signal is a clean speech signal; said normalizing arrangement being adapted to account for non-stationary noise in the at least one interfering signal, wherein said normalizing arrangement utilizes a multi-channel codeword-dependent cepstral normalization; said normalizing arrangement being further adapted to: estimate at least one characteristic of the at least one interference signal given at least one characteristic of the initial speech signal, wherein said estimating step comprises: referring to a single codebook in estimating at least one characteristic of the at least one interference signal; and apply a compensation term to the initial speech signal in reconciling the initial speech signal and the at least one interfering signal with one another, wherein said normalizing arrangement is adapted to estimate the compensation term via assessing its expectation value over a plurality of codewords in the codebook.