Noisy Environment-Aware Speech Enhancement for Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction Application

In this study, we introduce a noisy environment-aware speech enhancement system, which can be used in human-robot interaction (HRI) application for command recognition. In order to effectively filter different noises and improve speech recognition rates, the proposed system adopts automatic noise cancellation that is combined with independent component analysis (ICA) and subspace speech enhancement (SSE). Furthermore, it can automatically decide when to use noise reduction according to SNRs of the detected noisy speeches at any time (using proposed noisy environment-aware determination). The experimental results show that our proposed system is suitable for various types of noisy environments, and it is capable of improving the speech quality for recognition. Our proposed system can enhance SNRs by about 20dB, which is higher than those of original noisy speeches.