Acoustic distance measurement method based on interference of speech presented by a dialogue system

The distance to talkers is very important information for both hands-free speech interfaces and nursing-care robots. We have proposed an acoustic distance measurement method based on interference between the transmitted and reflected waves, which can measure distance in a short range. In the present paper, we propose an acoustic distance measurement method based on interference of speech presented by a dialogue system. In a dialogue system, dry sources of presented speech are known. Therefore, we can easily perform voice activity detection (VAD) for presented speech using a phoneme segmentation with a hidden Markov model. The proposed method estimates the distance to talkers in speech segments using the results of VAD. Finally, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method through experiments in real environments.