Enhanced voice user interface employing spatial filtration of signals from acoustic vector sensor

Spatial filtration of sound is introduced to enhance speech recognition accuracy in noisy conditions. An acoustic vector sensor (AVS) is employed. The signals from the AVS probe are processed in order to attenuate the surrounding noise. As a result the signal to noise ratio is increased. An experiment is featured in which speech signals are disturbed by babble noise. The signals before and after spatial filtration are processed by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine. It is shown that employing spatial filtration of signals from the AVS probe leads to a significant reduction in word error rate (WER) for a dictionary of 184 words.