Real-Time Robot Audition System That Recognizes Simultaneous Speech in The Real World

— This paper presents a robot audition system that recognizes simultaneous speech in the real world by using robotembedded microphones. We have previously reported Missing Feature Theory (MFT) based integration of Sound Source Separation (SSS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for building robust robot audition. We demonstrated that a MFTbased prototype system drastically improved the performance of speech recognition even when three speakers talked to a robot simultaneously. However, the prototype system had three problems; being offline, hand-tuning of system parameters, and failure in Voice Activity Detection (VAD). To attain online processing, we introduced FlowDesigner-based architecture to integrate sound source localization (SSL), SSS and ASR. This architecture brings fast processing and easy implementation because it provides a simple framework of shared-object-based integration. To optimize the parameters, we developed Genetic Algorithm (GA) based parameter optimizatio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Shun'ichi Yamamoto, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Mikio Nakano, Hiroshi Tsujino, Jean-Marc Valin, Kazunori Komatani, Tetsuya Ogata, Hiroshi G. Okuno
• Keywords: IROS 2006, Robot Audition, Robotics, Simultaneous Speech, Sound Source