Design and implementation of a robot audition system for automatic speech recognition of simultaneous speech

This paper addresses robot audition that can cope with speech that has a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in real time by using robot-embedded microphones. To cope with such a noise, we exploited two key ideas; Preprocessing consisting of sound source localization and separation with a microphone array, and system integration based on missing feature theory (MFT). Preprocessing improves the SNR of a target sound signal using geometric source separation with multichannel post-filter. MFT uses only reliable acoustic features in speech recognition and masks unreliable parts caused by errors in preprocessing. MFT thus provides smooth integration between preprocessing and automatic speech recognition. A real-time robot audition system based on these two key ideas is constructed for Honda ASIMO and Humanoid SIG2 with 8-ch microphone arrays. The paper also reports the improvement of ASR performance by using two and three simultaneous speech signals.