Robust speech recognition with speaker localization by a microphone array

This paper proposes robust speech recognition with speaker localization by an arrayed microphone (SLAM) to realize a hands-free speech interface in noisy environments. In order to localize a speaker direction accurately in low SNR conditions, a speaker localization algorithm based on extracting pitch harmonics is introduced. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, speech recognition experiments are carried out both in computer simulation and real environments. These results show that the proposed system attains much higher speech recognition performance than that of a single microphone not only in computer simulation but also in real environments.