# Automatic channel selection and spatial feature integration for multi-channel speech recognition across various array topologies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CabinSep: IR-Augmented Mask-Based MVDR for Real-Time In-Car Speech Separation with Distributed Heterogeneous Arrays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01399/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has shown remarkable progress, yet it still faces challenges in real-world distant scenarios across various array topologies each with multiple recording devices. The focal point of the CHiME-7 Distant ASR task is to devise a unified system capable of generalizing various array topologies that have multiple recording devices and offering reliable recognition performance in real-world environments. Addressing this task, we introduce an ASR system that demonstrates exceptional performance across various array topologies. First of all, we propose two attention-based automatic channel selection modules to select the most advantageous subset of multi-channel signals from multiple recording devices for each utterance. Furthermore, we introduce inter-channel spatial features to augment the effectiveness of multi-frame cross-channel attention, aiding it in improving the capability of spatial information awareness. Finally, we propose a multi-layer convolution fusion module drawing inspiration from the U-Net architecture to integrate the multi-channel output into a single-channel output. Experimental results on the CHiME-7 corpus with oracle segmentation demonstrate that the improvements introduced in our proposed ASR system lead to a relative reduction of 40.1% in the Macro Diarization Attributed Word Error Rates (DA-WER) when compared to the baseline ASR system on the Eval sets.