Spoken Instruction Understanding in Air Traffic Control: Challenge, Technique, and Application

In air traffic control (ATC), speech communication with radio transmission is the primary way to exchange information between the controller and aircrew. A wealth of contextual situational dynamics is embedded implicitly; thus, understanding the spoken instruction is particularly significant to the ATC research. In this paper, a comprehensive review related to spoken instruction understanding (SIU) in the ATC domain is provided from the perspective of the challenges, techniques, and applications. Firstly, a full pipeline is represented to achieve the SIU task, including automatic speech recognition, language understanding, and voiceprint recognition. A total of 10 technique challenges are analyzed based on the ATC task specificities. In succession, the common techniques for SIU tasks are categorized from common applications, and extensive works in the ATC domain are also reviewed. Finally, a series of future research topics are also prospected based on the corresponding challenges. The author sincerely hopes that this work is able to provide a clear technical roadmap for the SIU tasks in the ATC domain and further make contributions to the research community.