Real-time implementation of blind spatial subtraction array for hands-free robot spoken dialogue system

In this paper, we construct a hands-free robot spoken dialogue system based on the real-time blind spatial subtraction array (BSSA) and evaluate the system. BSSA is the blind source extraction method, and the source extraction in BSSA is carried out by subtracting the power spectrum of the estimated noise signal by the independent component analysis from the power spectrum of the target speech partly enhanced signal. Although BSSA can reduce noise signal efficiently, ICA consumes huge amount of computational costs. Thus it is difficult to run BSSA in real-time. In this paper, we newly propose a real-time architecture of BSSA and construct a hands-free robot spoken dialogue system based on the real-time BSSA. In the hands-free robot spoken dialogue system with the real-time BSSA, 6% improvement of the speech recognition result can be seen compared with the conventional speech enhancement methods.