End-to-End Direction-Aware Keyword Spotting with Spatial Priors in Noisy Environments

Abstract

Keyword spotting (KWS) is crucial for many speech-driven applications, but robust KWS in noisy environments remains challenging. Conventional systems often rely on single-channel inputs and a cascaded pipeline separating front-end enhancement from KWS. This precludes joint optimization, inherently limiting performance. We present an end-to-end multi-channel KWS framework that exploits spatial cues to improve noise robustness. A spatial encoder learns inter-channel features, while a spatial embedding injects directional priors; the fused representation is processed by a streaming backbone. Experiments in simulated noisy conditions across multiple signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) show that spatial modeling and directional priors each yield clear gains over baselines, with their combination achieving the best results. These findings validate end-to-end multi-channel spatial modeling, indicating strong potential for the target-speaker-aware detection in complex acoustic scenarios.