Robot with two ears listens to more than two simultaneous utterances by exploiting harmonic structures

Yasuharu Hirasawa*, Toru Takahashi, Tetsuya Ogata, Hiroshi G. Okuno

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In real-world situations, people often hear more than two simultaneous sounds. For robots, when the number of sound sources exceeds that of sensors, the situation is called under-determined, and robots with two ears need to deal with this situation. Some studies on under-determined sound source separation use L1-norm minimization methods, but the performance of automatic speech recognition with separated speech signals is poor due to its spectral distortion. In this paper, a two-stage separation method to improve separation quality with low computational cost is presented. The first stage uses a L1-norm minimization method in order to extract the harmonic structures. The second stage exploits reliable harmonic structures to maintain acoustic features. Experiments that simulate three utterances recorded by two microphones in an anechoic chamber show that our method improves speech recognition correctness by about three points and is fast enough for real-time separation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationModern Approaches in Applied Intelligence - 24th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2011, Proceedings
Pages348-358
Number of pages11
EditionPART 1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event24th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2011 - Syracuse, NY, United States
Duration: 2011 Jun 282011 Jul 1

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 1
Volume6703 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference24th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySyracuse, NY
Period11/6/2811/7/1

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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