Simultaneous Blind Separation and Recognition of Speech Mixtures Using Two Microphones to Control a Robot Cleaner

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for the simultaneous separation and recognition of speech mixtures in noisy environments using two-channel based independent vector analysis (IVA) on a home-robot cleaner. The issues to be considered in our target application are speech recognition at a distance and noise removal to cope with a variety of noises, including TV sounds, air conditioners, babble, and so on, that can occur in a house, where people can utter a voice command to control a robot cleaner at any time and at any location, even while a robot cleaner is moving. Thus, the system should always be in a recognition-ready state to promptly recognize a spoken word at any time, and the false acceptance rate should be lower. To cope with these issues, the keyword spotting technique is applied. In addition, a microphone alignment method and a model-based real-time IVA approach are proposed to effectively and simultaneously process the speech and noise sources, as well as to cover 360-degree directions irrespective o...