Robust Recognition of Simultaneous Speech By a Mobile Robot

—This paper describes a system that gives a mobile robot the ability to perform automatic speech recognition with simultaneous speakers. A microphone array is used along with a real-time implementation of geometric source separation (GSS) and a postfilter that gives a further reduction of interference from other sources. The postfilter is also used to estimate the reliability of spectral features and compute a missing feature mask. The mask is used in a missing feature theory-based speech recognition system to recognize the speech from simultaneous Japanese speakers in the context of a humanoid robot. Recognition rates are presented for three simultaneous speakers located at 2 m from the robot. The system was evaluated on a 200-word vocabulary at different azimuths between sources, ranging from 10 ◦ to 90 ◦ . Compared to the use of the microphone array source separation alone, we demonstrate an average reduction in relative recognition error rate of 24% with the postfilter and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Jean-Marc Valin, Shun'ichi Yamamoto, Jean Rouat, François Michaud, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Hiroshi G. Okuno
• Keywords: CORR 2016, Education