INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

On Noise Robust Voice Activity Detection

Tomas Dekens, Werner Verhelst

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

In this paper, we show that the performance of voice activity detection algorithms (VAD) can be highly dependent on the type of background noise and we introduce a new VAD algorithm that is based on relative energy measurements in different frequency bands. The obtained experimental results are compared to the results obtained with two other spectrum-based VADs and it is concluded that a VAD, configured to use around 3 frequency bands can cope best with a large variety of background sounds.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Dekens, Tomas / Verhelst, Werner (2011): "On noise robust voice activity detection", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2649-2652.