NDLI: An easily-configurable robot audition system using Histogram-based Recursive Level Estimation

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Nakajima, H. Ince, G. Nakadai, K. Hasegawa, Y.
Copyright Year	2010
Description	Author affiliation: Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd, 8-1, Honcho, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0188, Japan (Nakajima, H.; Ince, G.; Nakadai, K.; Hasegawa, Y.)
Abstract	This paper presents an easily-configurable robot audition system using the Histogram-based Recursive Level Estimation (HRLE) method. In order to achieve natural human-robot interaction, a robot should recognize human speeches even if there are some noises and reverberations. Since the precision of automatic speech recognizers (ASR) have been degraded by such interference, many systems applying speech enhancement processes have been reported. However, performance of most reported systems suffer from acoustical environmental changes. For example, an enhancement process optimized for steady-state noise, such as fan noise, yields low performance when the process is used for non-steady-state noises, such as background music. The primary reason is mismatches of parameters because the appropriate parameters change according to the acoustical environments. To solve this problem, we propose a robot audition system that optimizes parameters adaptively and automatically. Our system applies linear and non-linear enhancement sub-processes. For the linear sub-process, we used Geometric Source Separation with the Adaptive Step-size method (GSS-AS). This adjusts the parameters adaptively and does not have any manual parameters. For the non-linear sub-process, we applied a spectral subtraction-based enhancement method with the HRLE method that is newly introduced in this paper. Since HRLE controls the threshold level parameter implicitly based on the statistical characteristics of noise and speech levels, our system has high robustness against acoustical environmental changes. For robot audition systems, all processes should be performed in real-time. We also propose implementation techniques to make HRLE run in real-time and show the effectiveness. We evaluate performance of our system and compare it to conventional systems based on the Minima Controlled Recursive Average (MCRA) method and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) method. The experimental results show that our system achieves better performance than the conventional systems.
Starting Page	958
Ending Page	963
File Size	1589813
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781424466740
ISSN	21530866
e-ISBN	9781424466764
DOI	10.1109/IROS.2010.5653639
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2010-10-18
Publisher Place	Taiwan
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Noise Speech enhancement Speech Robots Speech recognition Time frequency analysis Steady-state
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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