An experiment with a non-head-mounted microphone for discrete utterance recognition (DUR)

Typically, DUR systems use a head-mounted microphone in order to keep the distance between the mouth and microphone - and therefore the input conditions - constant over time. These devices, unfortunately, also limit user-flexibility and may be quite uncomfortable. A goal of the current work is to ascertain the feasibility of a two-microphone, shoulder-mounted system. The experiment was based on data recorded simultaneously, in PCM, from the reference head-mounted microphone and the experimental system. Results based on machine DUR for two different vocabularies and two combination algorithms are presented. One very simple combination algorithm gave results which compared quite favorably to the performance of the head-mounted transducer.