Double-Talk Free Spoken Dialogue Interface Combining Sound Field Control With Semi-Blind Source Separation

In this paper we introduce a new double-talk free spoken dialogue interface combining sound field control and a source separation technique based on independent component analysis (ICA). First, sound field control provides silent zones on the microphone elements and prevents the response sound from being observed. In the second step, we propose a novel semi-blind source separation algorithm to suppress the error caused by fluctuation of the room transfer function. By using a direct input of response sound signal to ICA, a source separation problem can be converted to a supervised learning problem. Since the problem becomes easier, the proposed method showed higher performances than the method using blind source separation