Microphone Array for Hands-Free Voice Communication in a Car

We present the results of our research on developing a speech acquisition and enhancement system so that a speech recognizer can reliably be used inside a noisy automobile environment, for the digital cellular telephone application. Our research results have demonstrated that a beamforming method with a microphone array is a reliable approach for hands-free voice dialing application in the car noise environment. Two beamforming algorithms were investigated in our research: delay-and-sum beam-former and generalized sidelobe canceler. Performance evaluation results of these two algorithms are presented for speech database collected in real cars under different noise conditions. Signal-to-noise ratio and speech recognition error rate were used as performance measures in these evaluations.

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