An evaluation of hands-free voice activity detection algorithm based on weighted cross-power spectrum phase analysis and zero crossing detector
Takamasa Tanaka, Yuki Denda, Masato Nakayama, Takanobu Nishiura · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
VAD (voice activity detection) is necessary for recognizing hands-free speech. However, conventional VADs could not achieve enough detection performance in real noisy environments because they utilize only time-sequence information or only spatial-sequence information of captured signals. To cope with this problem, we have already proposed noise-robust hands-free VAD by composing the time-sequence and spatial-sequence information. The conventional ZCD (zero crossing detector) was employed to acquire the time-sequence information, and weighted CSP (cross-power spectrum phase) analysis that was a specialized DOA (direction of arrival) estimation algorithm for speech signal was also employed to acquire the spatial-sequence information. However, this algorithm can insufficiently improve the VAD performance in higher noisy environments. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we try to utilize talker direction information and attempt the environmental adaptation of our former algorithm. As a result of evaluation experiments in real acoustic environment, the proposed hands-free VAD could achieve a more effective performance than the conventional VAD and our former VAD. [Work supported by MEXT of Japan.]