Narrowband direction of arrival for full band beamformer
US11276397B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Mar 1, 2019 |
| Grant date | Mar 15, 2022 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jun 3, 2039 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG10L2021/02166
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A system and method for improving the performance of a hands-free voice user interface system while minimizing the computational complexity without sacrificing performance. Specifically, when estimating the location of the talker for the purpose of steering a directional beam in the direction of the active talker. A hands-free voice user interface system requires a clean signal to be streamed to the cloud for recognition. One way to improve the speech signal is to estimate where the talker is and steer a beam in the direction of the active talker. To locate the talker to a localized position, a direction of arrival estimator (DOA) algorithm is used. DoA generally requires noise and echo free signal for optimal estimation, but it is computationally expensive to run audio pre-processing such as an acoustic echo cancellation for each microphone in microphone array. To reduce computational complexity, the system and method extract certain range of frequency and operate pre-processing only on the selected frequency. By properly selecting the frequency range, it does not degrade DoA accuracy while significantly reducing computational complexity.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.