# Robust Multi-channel Speech Recognition using Frequency Aligned Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Self-Attention Channel Combinator Frontend for End-to-End Multichannel Far-field Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04783/) (2021)
- [ChannelAugment: Improving generalization of multi-channel ASR by training with input channel randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11225/) (2021)
- [Multi-channel multi-speaker transformer for speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02688/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional speech enhancement technique such as beamforming has known benefits for far-field speech recognition. Our own work in frequency-domain multi-channel acoustic modeling has shown additional improvements by training a spatial filtering layer jointly within an acoustic model. In this paper, we further develop this idea and use frequency aligned network for robust multi-channel automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike an affine layer in the frequency domain, the proposed frequency aligned component prevents one frequency bin influencing other frequency bins. We show that this modification not only reduces the number of parameters in the model but also significantly and improves the ASR performance. We investigate effects of frequency aligned network through ASR experiments on the real-world far-field data where users are interacting with an ASR system in uncontrolled acoustic environments. We show that our multi-channel acoustic model with a frequency aligned network shows up to 18% relative reduction in word error rate.