Towards Robust Speech Recognition for Human-Robot Interaction

Robust speech recognition under noisy conditions like in human-robot interaction (HRI) in a natural environment often can only be achieved by relying on a headset and restricting the available set of utterances or the set of different speakers. Current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly based on finite-state grammars (FSG) or statistical language models like Tri-grams, which achieve good recognition rates but have specific limitations such as a high rate of false positives or insufficient rates for the sentence accuracy. In this paper we present an investigation of comparing different forms of spoken human-robot interaction including a ceiling boundary microphone and microphones of the humanoid robot NAO with a headset. We describe and evaluate an ASR system using a multipass decoder – which combines the advantages of an FSG and a Tri-gram decoder – and show its usefulness in HRI.

@InProceedings{HW11, 
 	 author =  {Heinrich, Stefan and Wermter, Stefan},  
 	 title = {Towards Robust Speech Recognition for Human-Robot Interaction}, 
 	 booktitle = {Proceedings of the IROS2011 Workshop on Cognitive Neuroscience Robotics (CNR)},
 	 editors = {Narioka, K. and Nagai, Y. and Asada, M. and Ishiguro, H.},
 	 number = {},
 	 volume = {},
 	 pages = {29--34},
 	 year = {2011},
 	 month = {Sep},
 	 publisher = {},
 	 doi = {}, 
 }