Automatic speech recognition using acoustic doppler signal

In this paper, a new automatic speech recognition (ASR) was proposed where ultrasonic doppler signals were used, instead of conventional speech signals. The proposed method has the advantages over the conventional speech/non-speech-based ASR including robustness against acoustic noises and user comfortability associated with usage of the non-contact sensor. In the method proposed herein, 40 kHz ultrasonic signal was radiated toward to the mouth and the reflected ultrasonic signals were then received. Frequency shift caused by the doppler effects was used to implement ASR. The proposed method employed multi-channel ultrasonic signals acquired from the various locations, which is different from the previous method where single channel ultrasonic signal was employed. The PCA(Principal Component Analysis) coefficients were used as the features of ASR in which hidden markov model (HMM) with left-right model was adopted. To verify the feasibility of the proposed ASR, the speech recognition experiment was carried out the 60 Korean isolated words obtained from the six speakers. Moreover, the experiment results showed that the overall word recognition rates were comparable with the conventional speech-based ASR methods and the performance of the proposed method was superior to the conventional signal channel ASR method. Especially, the average recognition rate of 90 % was maintained under the noise environments.