In this work, we propose a new automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on feature learning and an end-to-end training procedure for air traffic control (ATC) systems. The proposed model integrates the feature learning block, recurrent neural network (RNN), and connectionist temporal classification loss to build an end-to-end ASR model. Facing the complex environments of ATC speech, instead of the handcrafted features, a learning block is designed to extract informative features from raw waveforms for acoustic modeling. Both the SincNet and 1D convolution blocks are applied to process the raw waveforms, whose outputs are concatenated to the RNN layers for the temporal modeling. Thanks to the ability to learn representations from raw waveforms, the proposed model can be optimized in a complete end-to-end manner, i.e., from waveform to text. Finally, the multilingual issue in the ATC domain is also considered to achieve the ASR task by constructing a combined vocabulary of Chinese characters and English letters. The proposed approach is validated on a multilingual real-world corpus (ATCSpeech), and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other baselines, achieving a 6.9% character error rate.

Human action recognition (HAR) exhibits limited accuracy in video surveillance due to the 2D information captured with monocular cameras. To address the problem, a depth estimation-based human skeleton action recognition method (SARDE) is proposed in this study, with the aim of transforming 2D human action data into 3D format to dig hidden action clues in the 2D data. SARDE comprises two tasks, i.e., human skeleton action recognition and monocular depth estimation. The two tasks are integrated in a multi-task manner in end-to-end training to comprehensively utilize the correlation between action recognition and depth estimation by sharing parameters to learn the depth features effectively for human action recognition. In this study, graph-structured networks with inception blocks and skip connections are investigated for depth estimation. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in skeleton action recognition that the method reaches state-of-the-art on the datasets.