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

Shun'ichi Yamamoto, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Mikio Nakano, Hiroshi Tsujino, Jean-marc Valin, Kazunori Komatani, Tetsuya Ogata, Hiroshi Okuno
2006 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems  
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
more » ... totype 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 optimization, because it is difficult to build an analytical optimization model for mutually dependent system parameters. To improve VAD, we integrated new VAD based on a power spectrum and location of a sound source into the system, since conventional VAD relying only on power often fails due to low signal-to-noise ratio of simultaneous speech. We, then, constructed a robot audition system for Honda ASIMO. As a result, we showed that the system worked online and fast, and had a better performance in robustness and accuracy through experiments on recognition of simultaneous speech in a noisy and echoic environment.
doi:10.1109/iros.2006.282037 dblp:conf/iros/YamamotoNNTVKOO06 fatcat:imh6cuppvzh35eggpzp3lenexi