Interfacing speech recognition an vision guided microphone array technologies

One goal of a pervasive computing environment is to allow the user to interact with the environment in an easy and natural manner. The use of spoken commands, as inputs to a speech recognition system, is one such way to naturally interact with the environment. In challenging acoustic environments, microphone arrays can improve the quality of the input audio signal by beamforming, or steering, to the location of the speaker of interest. The existence of multiple speakers, large interfering signals and/or reverberations or reflections in the audio signal(s) requires the use of advanced beamforming techniques which attempt to separate the target audio from the mixed signal received at the microphone array. In this thesis I present and evaluate a method of modeling reverberations as separate anechoic interfering sources emanating from fixed locations. This acoustic modelling technique allows for tracking of acoustic changes in the environment, such as those caused by speaker motion.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Rangarajan, Vibhav Shyam, 1980-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Trevor Darrell.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/29687

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/29687