Exploration of rank order coding with spiking neural networks for speech recognition

Speech recognition is very difficult in the context of noisy and corrupted speech. Most conventional techniques need huge databases to estimate speech (or noise) density probabilities to perform recognition. We discuss the potential of perceptive speech analysis and processing in combination with biologically plausible neural network processors. We illustrate the potential of such non-linear processing of speech by means of a preliminary test with recognition of French spoken digits from a small speech database