Speaker Recognition Based on the Combination of SincNet and Neuro-Fuzzy for Intelligent Home Service Robots

Speaker recognition has become a critical component of human–robot interaction (HRI), enabling personalized services based on user identity, as the demand for home service robots increases. In contrast to conventional speech recognition tasks, recognition in home service robot environments is affected by varying speaker–robot distances and background noises, which can significantly reduce accuracy. Traditional approaches rely on hand-crafted features, which may lose essential speaker-specific information during extraction like mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). To address this, we propose a novel speaker recognition technique for intelligent robots that combines SincNet-based raw waveform processing with an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). SincNet extracts relevant frequency features by learning low- and high-cutoff frequencies in its convolutional filters, reducing parameter complexity while retaining discriminative power. To improve interpretability and handle non-linearity, ANFIS is used as the classifier, leveraging fuzzy rules generated by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. The model is evaluated on a custom dataset collected in a realistic home environment with background noise, including TV sounds and mechanical noise from robot motion. Our results show that the proposed model outperforms existing CNN, CNN-ANFIS, and SincNet models in terms of accuracy. This approach offers robust performance and enhanced model transparency, making it well-suited for intelligent home robot systems.