Microphone array processing for distance speech capture: A probe study on whisper speech detection

In this study, we develop a probe system for whisper-island detection for distance speech capture using a microphone array technique. The developed corpus consists of distance speech in neutral vocal effort and embedded with whisper speech which are produced at different distances for this study. The microphone array beamforming technique is used to enhance the distance speech before being processed by the whisper-island detection system. The enhanced distance speech provides better vocal effort change point detection results, which is indicated by either 0.0% miss detection rate or lower Multi-Error Score (MES) compared to unprocessed distance speech. The final whisper-island detection results produce a higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate for enhanced speech, which illustrates the improvement of whisper-island detection for distance speech attained from microphone array processing.