Role of head pose estimation in speech acquisition from distant microphones

Reverberant environments pose a challenge to speech acquisition from distant microphones. Approaches using microphone arrays have met with limited success. Recent research using audio-visual sensors for tasks such as speaker localization has shown improvement over traditional audio-only approaches. Using computer vision techniques we can estimate the orientation of the speaker´s head in addition to the location of the speaker. In this paper we study the utility of using the head pose information for effective beamforming and clean speech acquisition from distant microphones. The improvements in speech recognition accuracy relative to that of a close talking microphone are presented and the results provide sufficient motivation for incorporating head pose information in beamforming techniques.