Emerging applications in the field of speech processing are demanding increasing levels of performance in noise adverse environments. These systems often require a noise reduction scheme working in combination with a precise voice activity detector (VAD). This chapter shows an overview of the main challenges in robust speech detection and a review of the state of the art and applications. Experimental results show the effectiveness of VADs using contextual information when compared to recently reported algorithms.
Keywords: Voice activity detection, contextual information, robust speech recognition, speech enhancement.
