Efficient and Robust Arabic Automotive Speech Command Recognition System

The automotive speech recognition field has become an active research topic as it enables drivers to activate various in-car functionalities without being distracted. However, research in Arabic remains nascent compared to English, French, and German. Therefore, this paper presents a Moroccan Arabic automotive speech recognition system. Our system aims to enhance the driving experience to make it comfortable and safe while assisting individuals with disabilities. We created a speech dataset comprising 20 commonly used car commands. It consists of 5600 instances collected from Moroccan contributors and recorded in clean and noisy environments to increase its representativity. We used MFCC, weighted MFCC, and Spectral Subband Centroids (SSC) for feature extraction, as they demonstrated promising results in noisy settings. For classifier construction, we proposed a hybrid architecture, consisting of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Training our proposed model with WMFCC and SSC features achieved an accuracy of 98.48%, outperforming all baseline models we trained and outperforming the existing solutions in the state-of-the-art literature. Moreover, it shows promising results in a clean and noisy environment and maintains resilience to additive Gaussian noise while using few computational resources.