A digital microphone array for distant speech recognition

13 years 4 months ago

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In this paper, the design, implementation and testing of a digital microphone array is presented. The array uses digital MEMS microphones which integrate the microphone, ampliﬁer and analogue to digital converter on a single chip in place of the analogue microphones and external audio interfaces currently used. The device has the potential to be smaller, cheaper and more ﬂexible than typical analogue arrays, however the effect on speech recognition performance of using digital microphones is as yet unknown. In order to evaluate the effect, an analogue array and the new digital array are used to simultaneously record test data for a speech recognition experiment. Initial results employing no adaptation show that performance using the digital array is signiﬁcantly worse (14% absolute WER) than the analogue device. Subsequent experiments using MLLR and CMLLR channel adaptation reduce this gap, and employing MLLR for both channel and speaker adaptation reduces the difference between...

Erich Zwyssig, Mike Lincoln, Steve Renals

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