Voice pre-processing pipeline for exterior communications on autonomous vehicle

Abstract

Systems and methods for vehicles to communicate with people outside the vehicle. In particular, a two-way communication system is provided including exterior microphone arrays on the vehicle. Calls performed from the exterior of a vehicle can be difficult to implement with acceptable quality in noisy environments. A pipeline having multiple beamformers is provided to improve call quality, where the pipeline operates on the incoming data for each of the microphone arrays. Each beamformer estimates direction of arrival (DOA) of the speech signal, and utilizes the estimated DOA to generate spatial filtering coefficients to filter the signal. A beamformer can be used to generate a one channel output for each microphone array, and a mixer can be used to mix the signal output from each microphone array. The beamformer enables reliable two-way communication with acceptable listening quality and good intelligibility for the remote assistant listening to the captured signal.