Air- and bone-conductive integrated microphones for robust speech detection and enhancement

Abstract

We present a novel hardware device that combines a regular microphone with a bone-conductive microphone. The device looks like a regular headset and it can be plugged into any machine with a USB port. The bone-conductive microphone has an interesting property: it is insensitive to ambient noise and captures the low frequency portion of the speech signals. Thanks to the signals from the bone-conductive microphone, we are able to detect very robustly whether the speaker is talking, eliminating more than 90% of background speech. Furthermore, by combining both channels, we are able to remove background speech significantly, even when the background speaker speaks at the same time as the speaker wearing the headset.