Simulation of the Hands-free Speech Input to Speech Recognition Systems by Measuring Room Impulse Responses

Abstract:
A hardware and software approach is presented in this paper to measure the room impulse response that defines the transmission of audio signals in a room. This approach was developed within the European SpeeCon project. Graphical user interfaces have been designed to estimate the room impulse response from the recordings of noise signals that are transmitted in the room and to analyse the impulse response with respect to the reverberation time and the corresponding frequency response. The impulse response can be taken to artificially create speech data that contain the influence of a hands-free speech input in a room. We used these speech data to investigate the performance degradation of a speech recognition system for this acoustic input condition. A few exemplary results are presented.