Hiroshi G. Okuno
Kyoto University, Kyoto University of Education, Waseda University, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics, Honda (Japan), Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo University of Science, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Papers
196
Total Citations
3,789
H-Index
33
About
Hiroshi G. Okuno is a pioneering researcher in robot audition and human-robot interaction, whose work has fundamentally shaped how robots perceive and process sound in real-world environments. His research centers on enabling robots to localize, separate, and recognize multiple simultaneous sound sources — a capability as cognitively demanding for machines as it is natural for humans. Okuno's most influential contribution is the development of HARK (Honda Research Institute Japan Audition for Robots with Kyoto University), an open-source robot audition software system introduced in 2008 and formalized in a 2010 paper garnering over 200 citations. HARK democratized advanced auditory processing by making robust sound source localization, separation, and speech recognition accessible across diverse robot platforms. His earlier work on active audition for humanoid robots (2000, 212 citations) laid the conceptual groundwork, demonstrating that robots could actively direct their auditory attention much like humans do. His research on microphone arrays, head-related transfer functions, and geometric source separation further strengthened robot speech recognition under noisy, reverberant conditions. With contributions spanning connectionist language-motion integration and multi-talker visual-auditory tracking, Okuno's career represents a sustained effort to build robots that genuinely listen — accumulating nearly 1,000 citations across his landmark publications alone.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Active Audition for Humanoid212 citations · 2000
- 2
- 3Real-time sound source localization and separation for robot audition90 citations · 2002
- 4
- 5Robust Recognition of Simultaneous Speech by a Mobile Robot81 citations · 2007
- 6Robot audition: Its rise and perspectives71 citations · 2015
- 7An open source software system for robot audition HARK and its evaluation70 citations · 2008
- 8
- 9
- 10