A robust and effective voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm is proposed for improving speech recognition performance in noisy environments. The approach is based on filtering the input channel to avoid high energy noisy components and then the determination of the speech/non-speech bispectra by means of third order auto-cumulants. This algorithm differs from many others in the way the decision rule is formulated (detection tests) and the domain used in this approach. Clear improvements in speech/non-speech discrimination accuracy demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VAD. It is shown that application of statistical detection test leads to a better separation of the speech and noise distributions, thus allowing a more effective discrimination and a tradeoff between complexity and performance. The algorithm also incorporates a previous noise reduction block improving the accuracy in detecting speech and non-speech.
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