In this paper, we address the problem of speech recognition in
the presence of additive noise. We investigate the applicability
and efficacy of auditory masking in devising a robust front end
for noisy features. This is achieved by introducing a masking
factor into the Vector Taylor Series (VTS) equations. The resultant
first order VTS approximation is used to compensate the parameters
of a clean speech model and a Minimum Mean Square
Error (MMSE) estimate is used to estimate the clean speech
features. The proposed algorithms are validated through experiments
on a noise corrupted TIMIT speech recognition database.
We show significant performance gain for the proposed method
as compared to the traditional VTS algorithm.