Abstract: The present invention provides a method and apparatus for detecting speech spectral peaks and a speech recognition method and system. The method for detecting speech spectral peaks comprises detecting speech spectral peak candidates from power spectrum of the speech, and removing noise peaks from the speech spectral peak candidates according to peak duration and/or peak positions of adjacent frames, to detect speech spectral peaks. In the present invention, reliable speech spectral peaks can be obtained by removing noise peaks using the limitations of peak duration and adjacent frames in the detection of the speech spectral peaks. Further the energy values of the speech spectral peaks are used to extract the MFCC feature of speech instead of a sample sequence of the whole power spectrum in the conventional technique, the noise robustness of speech recognition can be enhanced while not increasing the speech feature dimensions.