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

为了利用语音通道和射频识别(RFID)技术提供可靠的人与对象交互，人们探索了新的研究途径。其目的是将语音技术集成到RFID网络中，使人类操作员能够与RFID设备、带有RFID标签的物体和相关信息系统进行语音通信。语音和RFID技术的结合预计将提高众多制造和商业操作的速度、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得到解决，并构成了语音支持的RFID系统部署的障碍。为了确保所提出的RFID-语音框架在现实生活条件下(工厂和仓库环境)的有效性，应该提供非常健壮的实时语音识别和无约束且灵活的对话方案。因此，我们建议的策略包括在声学和语言两个层面上运作。在声学层面，提出了基于仿生方法的前沿算法(鸟群算法和遗传算法)来优化非平稳噪声的估计和跟踪。在语言层面，提出的策略包括利用分布式本体中的知识来减少混淆和歧义，并通过本体距离的新概念提供可靠的语义可信度度量。该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通过使用语音/RFID模式提供对企业信息系统的无处不在和直观的访问，这最终将导致制造业现实生活中的RFID应用的重要技术进步。

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.