On the importance of the microphone position for speech recognition in the car

One of the problems with speech recognition in the car is the position of the far talk microphone. This position not only implies more or less noise, coming from the car (engine, tires,...) or from other sources (traffic, wind noise,...) but also a different acoustical transfer function. In order to compare the microphone positions in the car, we recorded a multispeaker database in a car with 7 different positions and compared them on the basis of SNR and recognition rate. The position at the ceiling right in front of the speaker gave the best results.< >