Human-to-Object Interaction by Integrating Speech Technology into Radio Frequency Identification Networks

探索新的研究途径，以提供一个可靠的人与物体的互动，通过使用语音模态和射频识别（RFID）技术。其目的是将语音技术集成到RFID网络中，使操作人员能够与RFID设备、RFID标签对象和相关信息系统进行口头通信。 语音和RFID技术的结合有望提高许多制造业和商业运营的速度、准确性、人体工程学和安全性，如物品跟踪和监控、仓库管理和运输。然而，与语音组件的可靠性相关的许多问题仍然没有解决，并且构成了部署语音使能RFID系统的障碍。为了确保所提出的RFID-Speech框架在现实生活条件（制造厂和仓库环境）中的功效，应该提供非常鲁棒的实时语音识别和无约束且灵活的对话方案。因此，我们提出的战略包括在声学和语言两个层面上运作。在声学水平上，基于生物启发的方法（鸟群和遗传算法）的前沿算法被提出来优化非平稳噪声的估计和跟踪。在语言层面上，所提出的策略包括利用分布式本体中的知识，以减少混淆和歧义，并提供一个可靠的语义置信度通过一个新的概念的本体距离。这个概念也被合并到对话管理器组件中。这些创新的解决方案预计将提供无处不在的和直观的访问企业信息系统，通过使用语音/RFID模式，这将最终导致重要的技术进步，在现实生活中的RFID应用的制造业。

New research avenues are explored in order to provide a reliable human-to-object interaction by using speech modality and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The aim is to integrate speech technology into RFID networks to allow human operators to communicate verbally with RFID devices, RFID-tagged objects and related information systems. The combination of speech and RFID technologies is expected to improve speed, accuracy, ergonomics and safety of numerous manufacturing and business operations such as item tracking and monitoring, warehouse management, and shipping. However, many problems related to the reliability of the speech component remain unsolved and constitute obstacles in the way of the deployment of speech-enabled RFID systems. To insure the efficacy of the proposed RFID-Speech framework in real-life conditions (manufactory and warehouse environment), a very robust real-time speech recognition and a non-constrained and flexible dialogue scheme should be provided. Therefore, our proposed strategy consists of operating at both acoustic and language levels. At the acoustic level, cutting edge algorithms based on bio-inspired approaches (bird flocking and genetic algorithms) are proposed to optimize the estimation and tracking of non-stationary noises. At the language level, the proposed strategy consists of leveraging knowledge in distributed ontologies to reduce confusability and ambiguity and to provide a reliable semantic confidence measure through a new concept of ontological distance. This concept is also incorporated into the dialogue manager component. These innovative solutions are expected to provide ubiquitous and intuitive access to the enterprise information systems by using speech/RFID modality, which will ultimately lead to important technological advances in real-life RFID applications of the manufacturing industry.