Inspired by recent evidence that a binary pattern may provide sufficient information for human speech recognition, this letter proposes a fundamentally different approach to robust automatic speech recognition. Specifically, recognition is performed by classifying binary masks corresponding to a word utterance. The proposed method is evaluated using a subset of the TIDigits corpus to perform isolated digit recognition. Despite dramatic reduction of speech information encoded in a binary mask, the proposed system performs surprisingly well. The system is compared with a traditional HMM based approach and is shown to perform well under low SNR conditions.