A microphone array processing technique for speech enhancement in a reverberant space

Author(s): Champagne, B., Kabal, P.

Journal/Book: Speech Commun. 1996; 18: PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands. Elsevier Science BV. 317-334.

Abstract: In this paper, a new microphone array processing technique is proposed for blind dereverberation of speech signals affected by room acoustics. It is based on the separate processing of the minimum-phase and all-pass components of delay-steered multi-microphone signals. The minimum-phase components are processed in the cepstrum-domain, where spatial averaging followed by low-time filtering is applied. The all-pass components, which contain the source location information, are processed in the frequency-domain by performing spatial averaging and by retaining only the all-pass component of the resulting output. The underlying motivation for the new processor is to use spatio-temporal processing over a single set of synchronous speech segments from several microphones to reconstruct the source speech, such that it is applicable to practical time-variant acoustic environments. Simulated room impulse responses are used to evaluate the new processor and to compare it to a conventional beamformer, Significant improvements in array gain and important reductions of reverberation in listening tests are observed.

Note: Article B Champagne, Univ Quebec, INRS Telecommun, 16 Pl Commerce, Verdun, Pq H3E 1H6, Canada

Keyword(s): ROOM IMPULSE-RESPONSE; FOURIER-TRANSFORM; INVERTIBILITY; ENVIRONMENTS; ACOUSTICS

Zurück | Weiter