Zero-crossing-based feature extraction for voice command systems using neck-microphones

Abstract

This paper presents zero-crossing-based feature extraction for the speech recognition using neck-microphones. One of the solutions in noise-robust speech recognition is using neck-microphones which are not affected by the environmental noises. However, neck-microphones distort the original voice signals significantly since they only capture the vibrations of vocal tracts. In this context, we consider a new method of enhancing speech features of neck-microphone signals using zero-crossings. Furthermore, for the improvement of zero-crossing features, we consider to use the statistics of two adjacent zero-crossing intervals, that is, the statistics of two samples referred to as the second order statistics. Through the simulation for speech recognition using the neck-microphone voice command system, we have shown that the suggested method provides the better performance than other approaches using conventional speech features. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.