Quantifying Noise Robustness of Bone-Conducted Speech

This paper quantitatively explores the noise robustness of bone-conducted (BC) speech in different noise environments. Although BC speech is inherently not suspicious to ambient noises, it is not noise free. By measuring the amount of noises passed through a BC microphone, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of BC speech was measured. The result shows that BC speech provides a SNR gain of about 10 dB relative to the corresponding air-conducted (AC) speech. The SNR gain slightly changes depending on the noise type and whether if the speaker is male or female.