Multi-room speech activity detection using a distributed microphone network in domestic environments

Domestic environments are particularly challenging for distant speech recognition: reverberation, background noise and interfering sources, as well as the propagation of acoustic events across adjacent rooms, critically degrade the performance of standard speech processing algorithms. In this application scenario, a crucial task is the detection and localization of speech events generated by users within the various rooms. A specific challenge of multi-room environments is the inter-room interference that negatively affects speech activity detectors. In this paper, we present and compare different solutions for the multi-room speech activity detection task. The combination of a model-based room-independent speech activity detection module with a room-dependent inside/outside classification stage, based on specific features, provides satisfactory performance. The proposed methods are evaluated on a multi-room, multi-channel corpus, where spoken commands and other typical acoustic events occur in different rooms.