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arXiv · 2606.21340

Synthetic Audio Generation Framework for Air Traffic Control Speech Recognition

Raphaël Bagat·Zhe Zhang·Junichi Yamagishi·Irina Illina·Emmanuel Vincent
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Abstract

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, despite achieving remarkable accuracy in general-purpose domains with native speech (L1), struggle in domains like Air Traffic Control (ATC) due to strong channel noise, a presence of non-native (L2) English accents, and data scarcity. We propose a synthetic data generation pipeline with acoustical properties simulations specifically designed to address this lack of real data to improve recognition accuracy in the ATC domain. Our approach leverages a combination of neural generation techniques, including Text-to-Speech, Voice Conversion, L2-to-L1 accent conversion, and a novel controllable L1-to-L2 accent conversion framework built to simulate accented speech. Our experiments with the Whisper model on the ATCO2 corpus demonstrate that fine-tuning with either synthetic data alone, or a mix of real and synthetic data, significantly improves the word error rate over out-of-the-box and real data only baselines respectively.

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Raphaël Bagat, Zhe Zhang, Junichi Yamagishi, Irina Illina, Emmanuel Vincent. 2026-06-19. Synthetic Audio Generation Framework for Air Traffic Control Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21340

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