Improved speech recognition in noisy environments by using a throat microphone for accurate voicing detection

In this paper we show that microphones that capture the bone-conducted voice can be used to improve Automatic Speech Recognition in noisy environments. These microphones exhibit good noise rejection properties and their signals are therefore good indications of speech activity, even in very noisy conditions. We conducted experiments where we used a throat microphone signal as a Voice Activity Detection (VAD) input signal and found that recognition accuracies in non-stationary noise improve significantly compared to when VAD is executed on a conventional microphone signal.