Introducing Multiple Microphone Arrays for Enhancing Smart Home Voice Control

摘要

We have previously developed a voice control system for a home network system (HNS), using a microphone array technology. Although the microphone array achieved a convenient hands-free controller, a single array had limitations on coverage of sound collection and speech recognition rate. In this paper, we try to overcome the limitations by increasing the number of the microphone arrays. Specifically, we construct a microphone array network; using four separate arrays, and enhance algorithms of sound source localization (SSL) and sound source separation (SSS) on the network. We also conduct an experimental evaluation, where precision of SSL and speech recognition rate are evaluated in a real HNS test-bed. As a result, it is shown that the usage of multiple arrays significantly improves the coverage and speech recognition ratio, compared with the previous system.