Noise robust hands-free speech recognition using microphone array and Kalman filter as front-end system of conversational TV

In this paper, we investigate hands-free speech recognition as front-end system of conversational TV. The conversational TV is one of machine conversation systems to retrieve the interesting information by inquiring it to the TV. To realize the natural machine conversation without consciousness of microphone, hands-free speech recognition is required. In the hands-free speech recognition system, the directions of the arriving signal are estimated by using a microphone array and the desired signal is enhanced by beam forming. Then, the user utterance section is detected automatically from continuously observed signal. Furthermore, by applying the noise reduction and noise adaptation, the enhanced speech signal is recognized accurately.