Spoken Instruction Understanding in Air Traffic Control: Challenge, Technique, and Application

Yi Lin

doi:10.3390/aerospace8030065

Abstract

In air traffic control (ATC), speech communication with radio transmission is the primary way to exchange information between the controller and aircrew. A wealth of contextual situational dynamics is embedded implicitly; thus, understanding the spoken instruction is particularly significant to the ATC research. In this paper, a comprehensive review related to spoken instruction understanding (SIU) in the ATC domain is provided from the perspective of the challenges, techniques, and applications. Firstly, a full pipeline is represented to achieve the SIU task, including automatic speech recognition, language understanding, and voiceprint recognition. A total of 10 technique challenges are analyzed based on the ATC task specificities. In succession, the common techniques for SIU tasks are categorized from common applications, and extensive works in the ATC domain are also reviewed. Finally, a series of future research topics are also prospected based on the corresponding challenges. The author sincerely hopes that this work is able to provide a clear technical roadmap for the SIU tasks in the ATC domain and further make contributions to the research community.

Highlights

Common techniques have been evaluated to achieve the spoken instruction understanding (SIU) task [1]; the results demonstrated that common techniques failed to complete the SIU task with acceptable accuracy due to task specificities
A comprehensive review is made for the spoken instruction understanding in the air traffic control (ATC) domain
The concerning techniques for the SIU task are firstly specified, in which a total of 10 challenges are summarized based on the ATC specificities

Summary

Introduction

Air traffic control (ATC) is a complicated and time-varying system, in which operational safety is always a hot research topic. All achievements of an ATC center can be vetoed without any hesitation if any safety incident occurs. Air traffic safety is affected by various aspects of air traffic operation, from mechanical maintenance, resource management, to air traffic control. The safety of air traffic control is important since the aircraft is already in the air. There is no doubt that any effort deserves to be made to improve ATC safety [1]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion