Patent ID: 8041561

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