Methods for speech enhancement and speech recognition using neural networks

The present invention relates to implementing a system and method to improve speech recognition and speech enhancement of noisy speech. The present invention discloses a way to improve the noise robustness of a speech recognition system by providing additional input to a Neural Network speech classifier. The additional information characterizes the noise environment of the speech. The present invention further discloses a speech separation system that uses the output of the neural network. The speech separation system employs models for the speech and for the distractor or noise. The neural network is used to identify the most likely combinations of speech and noise. Furthermore, a system for efficiently finding the most likely clean speech log-spectrum value is disclosed.