A microphone array beamforming-based system for multi-talker speech separation

Abstract

This paper presents a Multichannel Speech Separation System (MCSS) based on new beamforming frequency domain method. The beamformer exploits the spatial properties of the source signals using a microphone array. Therefore, it is based on a prior knowledge of the position of the speakers relative to the array. The proposed beamformer is defined with two processing steps: the first one is to keep a unit gain of the desired signal and the other blocks the wanted signal and minimises the output power of the interferences within only one step. In order to separate multiple speakers, multiple beamformers are used simultaneously, where a beamformer is computed for each source considering the remaining sources as interferers. We test and evaluate the proposed MCSS on real recording mixtures extracted from 'Multichannel In-Car Speech Database'. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of speech separation. The quality of speech will be improved compared to the state-of-the-art.