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Waveear: Exploring a mmWave-based noise-resistant speech sensing for voice-user interface

  • Chenhan Xu
  • , Zhengxiong Li
  • , Hanbin Zhang
  • , Aditya Singh Rathore
  • , Huining Li
  • , Chen Song
  • , Kun Wang
  • , Wenyao Xu
  • SUNY Buffalo
  • Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
  • University of California at Los Angeles

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

145 Scopus citations

Abstract

Voice-user interface (VUI) has become an integral component in modern personal devices (e.g., smartphones, voice assistant) by fundamentally evolving the information sharing between the user and device. Acoustic sensing for VUI is designed to sense all acoustic objects; however, the existing VUI mechanism can only offer low-quality speech sensing. This is due to the audible and inaudible interference from complex ambient noise that limits the performance of VUI by causing denial-of-service (DoS) of user requests. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to enable noise-resistant speech sensing in VUI for executing critical tasks with superior efficiency and precision in robust environments. To this end, we investigate the feasibility of employing radio-frequency signals, such as millimeter wave (mmWave) for sensing the noise-resistant voice of an individual. We first perform an in-depth study behind the rationale of voice generation and resulting vocal vibrations. From the obtained insights, we present WaveEar, an end-to-end noise-resistant speech sensing system. WaveEar comprises a low-cost mmWave probe to localize the position of the speaker among multiple people and direct the mmWave signals towards the near-throat region of the speaker for sensing his/her vocal vibrations. The received signal, containing the speech information, is fed to our novel deep neural network for recovering the voice through exhaustive extraction. Our experimental evaluation under real-world scenarios with 21 participants shows the effectiveness of WaveEar to precisely infer the noise-resistant voice and enable a pervasive VUI in modern electronic devices.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2019 - Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages14-26
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450366618
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 12 2019
Event17th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2019 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Jun 17 2019Jun 21 2019

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2019 - Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Conference

Conference17th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2019
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period06/17/1906/21/19

Keywords

  • MmWave
  • Neural network
  • Speech recognition
  • Voice-user interface

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