Improvement in listening capability for humanoid robot HRP-2

— This paper describes improvement of sound source separation for a simultaneous automatic speech recognition (ASR) system of a humanoid robot. A recognition error in the system is caused by a separation error and interferences of other sources. In separability, an original geometric source separation (GSS) is improved. Our GSS uses a measured robot’s head related transfer function (HRTF) to estimate a separation matrix. As an original GSS uses a simulated HRTF calculated based on a distance between microphone and sound source, there is a large mismatch between the simulated and the measured transfer functions. The mismatch causes a severe degradation of recognition performance. Faster convergence speed of separation matrix reduces separation error. Our approach gives a nearer initial separation matrix based on a measured transfer function from an optimal separation matrix than a simulated one. As a result, we expect that our GSS improves the convergence speed. Our GSS is also able...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Toru Takahashi, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Kazunori Komatani, Tetsuya Ogata, Hiroshi G. Okuno
• Keywords: ICRA 2010, Robotics, Separation Error, Separation Matrix, Source Separation