Blind speech separation for robots with intelligent human-machine interaction

Abstract

Speech recognition rate will deteriorate greatly in human-machine interaction when the speaker’s speech mixes with a bystander’s voice. This paper proposes a time-frequency approach for Blind Source Seperation (BSS) for intelligent Human-Machine Interaction(HMI). Main idea of the algorithm is to simultaneously diagonalize the correlation matrix of the pre-whitened signals at different time delays for every frequency bins in time-frequency domain. The prososed method has two merits: (1) fast convergence speed; (2) high signal to interference ratio of the separated signals. Numerical evaluations are used to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with two other deconvolution algorithms. An efficient algorithm to resolve permutation ambiguity is also proposed in this paper. The algorithm proposed saves more than 10% of computational time with properly selected parameters and achieves good performances for both simulated convolutive mixtures and real room recorded speeches.