Abstract
Common applications of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, aerial drone) utilize the capabilities of mobile image or video capturing, whereas our article deals with acoustic-related scenarios. Especially for surveillance tasks, e.g. in disaster management or measurement of artificial environmental noise in large industrial areas, an UAV-based acoustic interaction or measurement can be important tasks. A sound and speech signal processing at UAVs is complex because of rotor and maneuver-related noise components. The signal processing has to consider various sound sources, and the wanted signals (e.g. artificial environmental noise or speech signals) have to be separated from the UAVs’ own flight and wind noise. The contribution discusses the acoustic scenarios and some acoustic characteristics of a sample UAV, including the effect of flight maneuvers. We recorded speech signals in best practice with regard to the outcome of our preliminary analyses and then conducted objective speech quality measurements and speech recognition experiments with a state-of-the-art recognizer. Aside, the measurability of environmental noise signals is analyzed exemplarily. The article concludes with lessons learned for acoustic UAV interactions or measurements and preliminary thoughts with regard to a novel category of ’low-noise’ UAVs.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the EU project “Collaborative strategies of heterogeneous robot activity at solving agriculture missions controlled via intuitive human-robot interfaces (HARMONIC)” within the “ERA.Net RUS Plus/Robotics” program 2018–2020 (project ID 99) co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant No. 01 DJ18011 and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research under Grant No. 18-58-76001_ERA.Net. Special thanks goes to Dominik Fischer and Franziska Wolf for their valuable experiments, enabling our study. We also thank Rohde & Schwarz SwissQual, in particular Jens Berger, for supplying the POLQA testbed.
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Jokisch, O., Siegert, I., Maruschke, M., Strutz, T., Ronzhin, A. (2019). Don’t Talk to Noisy Drones – Acoustic Interaction with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In: Salah, A., Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26061-3_19
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