Showing papers by "Futoshi Asano published in 2011"

Assessment of General Applicability of Ego Noise Estimation - Applications to Automatic Speech Recognition and Sound Source Localization -

Abstract: Noise generated due to the motion of a robot deteriorates the quality of the desired sounds recorded by robot-embedded microphones. On top of that, a moving robot is also vulnerable to its loud fan noise that changes its orientation relative to the moving limbs where the microphones are mounted on. To tackle the non-stationary ego-motion noise and the direction changes of fan noise, we propose an estimation method based on instantaneous prediction of ego noise using parameterized templates. We verify the ego noise suppression capability of the proposed estimation method on a humanoid robot by evaluating it on two important applications in the framework of robot audition: (1) automatic speech recognition and (2) sound source localization. We demonstrate that our method improves recognition and localization performance during both head and arm motions considerably.

Joint estimation of sound source location and noise covariance in spatially colored noise

Abstract: In this paper, sound source localization in spatially colored noise such as room reverberation is discussed. Two iterative algorithms for jointly estimating signal source parameters and noise covariance are proposed. Experimental results show that the estimation of noise covariance improves the spatial resolution of source localization.