Environmental sound recognition for robot audition using matching-pursuit

Abstract

Our goal is to achieve a robot audition system that is capable of recognizing multiple environmental sounds and making use of them in human-robot interaction. The main problems in environmental sound recognition in robot audition are: (1) recognition under a large amount of background noise including the noise from the robot itself, and (2) the necessity of robust feature extraction against spectrum distortion due to separation of multiple sound sources. This paper presents the environmental recognition of two sound sources fired simultaneously using matching pursuit (MP) with the Gabor wavelet, which extracts salient audio features from a signal. The two environmental sounds come from different directions, and they are localized by multiple signal classification and, using their geometric information, separated by geometric source separation with the aid of measured head-related transfer functions. The experimental results show the noise-robustness of MP although the performance depends on the properties of the sound sources. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.