TY - CHAP A1 - Zäh, Uwe A1 - Riedhammer, Korbinian A1 - Bocklet, Tobias A1 - Nöth, Elmar T1 - Clap Your Hands! Calibrating Spectral Subtraction for Dereverberation T2 - 2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing(ICASSP), Dallas, TX, USA, March 2010. N2 - Reverberation effects as observed by room microphones severely degrade the performance of automatic speech recognition systems. We investigate the use of dereverberation by spectral subtraction as proposed by Lebart and Boucher and introduce a simple approach to estimate the required decay parameter by clapping hands. Experiments on small vocabulary continuous speech recognition task on read speech show that using the calibrated dereverberation improves WER from 73.2 to 54.7 for the best microphone. In combination with system adaptation, the WER could be reduced to 28.2, which is only a 16% relative loss of performance comparison to using a headset instead of a room microphone. KW - Speech Recognition KW - robustness Y1 - 2010 SP - 4226 EP - 4229 ER -