CONVERSATION PROCESSING APPARATUS AND CONVERSATION PROCESSING METHOD

• US 20160307570A1
• Filed: 04/06/2016
• Published: 10/20/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 04/16/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (Honda Motor Company)
• Original Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (Honda Motor Company)
• Inventors: Utsunomiya, Kenta, Mizumoto, Takeshi, Nakadai, Kazuhiro
• Granted Patent: US 10,013,982 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 17/02 Preprocessing operations, e.g. segment selection; Pattern representation or modelling, e.g. based on linear discriminant analysis [LDA] or principal components; Feature selection or extraction
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 17/06 Decision making techniques; Pattern matching strategies
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 25/21 the extracted parameters being power information
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 25/51 for comparison or discrimination

Abstract

A conversation processing apparatus includes a sound collection unit configured to collect voice signals of a plurality of speakers, a conversation recording unit configured to record the voice signals of the speakers collected by the sound collection unit, and a conversation analysis unit configured to calculate a degree to which a conversation between any two speakers is stimulated by analyzing the conversation between the two speakers from the voice signals recorded on the conversation recording unit.

Claims

1. A conversation processing apparatus comprising:

a sound collection unit configured to collect voice signals of a plurality of speakers;

a conversation recording unit configured to record the voice signals of the speakers collected by the sound collection unit; and

a conversation analysis unit configured to calculate a degree to which a conversation between any two speakers is stimulated by analyzing the conversation between the two speakers from the voice signals recorded on the conversation recording unit.

2. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the degree of stimulation is based on an influence of each of any two speakers on the conversation in time series.

3. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the conversation analysis unit calculates the degree of stimulation between any two speakers using a thermal equation.

4. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the conversation analysis unit selects all pairs of any two speakers for the plurality of speakers, calculates the degree of stimulation for each selected pair, generates a weighted complete graph constituted of nodes and edges using the calculated degree of stimulation for each pair for weights of the edges, and estimates a central person of the conversation on the basis of the generated weighted complete graph.

5. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the conversation analysis unit normalizes a volume for the voice signal in the conversation between any two speakers.

6. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 5, wherein the conversation analysis unit normalizes the volume on the basis of a length of the voice signal spoken once for the voice signal in the conversation between any two speakers.

7. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the conversation analysis unit calculates the degree of stimulation between any two speakers for every predetermined time.

8. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the conversation analysis unit determines that the conversation is active when the degree of stimulation between any two speakers is greater than a predetermined threshold value.

9. The conversation processing apparatus according to claim 1, comprising:

a sound source localization unit configured to localize a sound source position using the voice signal collected by the sound collection unit; and

a sound source separation unit configured to perform sound source separation on the basis of a result of the localization by the sound source localization unit,

wherein the conversation recording unit records the voice signal of each speaker separated by the sound source separation unit.

10. A conversation processing method comprising:

collecting voice signals of a plurality of speakers;

recording the voice signals of the speakers collected in the sound collection procedure; and

calculating a degree to which a conversation between any two speakers is stimulated by analyzing the conversation between the two speakers from the voice signals recorded in the conversation recording procedure.