CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs , the North American research arm of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, announced a breakthrough in speech separation technology at an annual R&D open house held May 24 in Tokyo. Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, home to some of the world's leading experts in such areas as electronics and communications, multimedia, data analytics, computer vision, mechatronics and algorithms, holds more than 1,200 patents.
The research lab has created the world's first technology that separates in real time the simultaneous speech of multiple unknown speakers recorded with a single microphone. It’s a key step towards building machines that can interact in noisy environments, in the same way that humans can have meaningful conversations in the presence of many other conversations. “Solving the so-called ‘cocktail party problem’ has been the holy grail of speech processing for more than 50 years: we finally cracked it,” said Jonathan Le Roux, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist at MERL and one of the leading researchers on the project.
In tests, the simultaneous speeches of two and three people were separated with up to 90 and 80 percent accuracy, respectively. The technology, which was achieved using Mitsubishi Electric’s proprietary “deep clustering” method based on artificial intelligence (AI), is expected to contribute to more intelligible voice communications and more accurate automatic speech recognition. A characteristic feature of this approach is its versatility, in the sense that voices can be separated regardless of their language or the gender of the speakers.
Mitsubishi Electric will explore opportunities to apply this new speech separation technology to improve the quality of voice communications and the accuracy of automatic speech recognition in real environments, such as cars, homes and elevators.
“Until now, there has been no effective method to accurately reconstruct the speech of multiple unknown speakers recorded with just one microphone,” said Richard Waters, Ph.D., president, CEO and founding member of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.
About Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Inc. is the North American arm of the corporate research and development organization of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. More than 60 PhDs pursue application-motivated research and advanced development in a wide range of areas, including electronics and communications, multimedia, computer vision, data analytics, mechatronics and algorithms. Since 1991, the research lab has been awarded more than 1,200 patents. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Additional information is available at www.MERL.com .
Media contact: Robin Wachner Director, Corporate Communications Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. (714) 220-6986
