A 94-GHz Millimeter-Wave Sensor for Speech Signal Acquisition

Sensors

Sheng Li¹  Ying Tian¹  Guohua Lu¹  Yang Zhang²  Hao Lv²  Xiao Yu²  Huijun Xue²  Hua Zhang²  Jianqi Wang¹ 

[1] College of Biomedical Engineering, Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710032, China;

关键词: millimeter wave;    speech acquisition;    radar sensor;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s131114248

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

High frequency millimeter-wave (MMW) radar-like sensors enable the detection of speech signals. This novel non-acoustic speech detection method has some special advantages not offered by traditional microphones, such as preventing strong-acoustic interference, high directional sensitivity with penetration, and long detection distance. A 94-GHz MMW radar sensor was employed in this study to test its speech acquisition ability. A 34-GHz zero intermediate frequency radar, a 34-GHz superheterodyne radar, and a microphone were also used for comparison purposes. A short-time phase-spectrum-compensation algorithm was used to enhance the detected speech. The results reveal that the 94-GHz radar sensor showed the highest sensitivity and obtained the highest speech quality subjective measurement score. This result suggests that the MMW radar sensor has better performance than a traditional microphone in terms of speech detection for detection distances longer than 1 m. As a substitute for the traditional speech acquisition method, this novel speech acquisition method demonstrates a large potential for many speech related applications.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.