An Informed Parametric Spatial Filter Based on Instantaneous Direction-of-Arrival Estimates

Abstract

Extracting desired source signals in noisy and reverberant environments is required in many hands-free communication systems. In practical situations, where the position and number of active sources may be unknown and time-varying, conventional implementations of spatial filters do not provide sufficiently good performance. Recently, informed spatial filters have been introduced that incorporate almost instantaneous parametric information on the sound field, thereby enabling adaptation to new acoustic conditions and moving sources. In this contribution, we propose a spatial filter which generalizes the recently proposed informed linearly constrained minimum variance filter and informed minimum mean square error filter. The proposed filter uses multiple direction-of-arrival estimates and second-order statistics of the noise and diffuse sound. To determine those statistics, an optimal diffuse power estimator is proposed that outperforms state-of-the-art estimators. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed filter in dynamic acoustic conditions. For this purpose, we have considered a challenging scenario which consists of quickly moving sound sources during double-talk. The performance of the proposed spatial filter was evaluated in terms of objective measures including segmental signal-to-reverberation ratio and log spectral distance, and by means of a listening test confirming the objective results.