An efficient microphone array based voice activity detector for driver´s speech in noise and music rich in-vehicle environments

In this study, an efficient microphone array based voice activity detector (VAD) is proposed, specifically for the driver´s speech in a vehicle. Two pre-fixed beampatterns are designed to explore the knowledge of the in-vehicle spatial acoustic power distributions, based on which a simple voice active/inacitve classifier is also designed. Through real data experiment, the proposed VAD presents a novel and robust performance against various in-vehicle noisy scenarios.