Binaural asynchronous component cancellation — An extension of the spatial Wiener filter

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a novel binaural speech enhancement algorithm, called an asynchronous component cancellation Wiener filter (ACC-WF). It cancels not only uncorrelated noise components but also asynchronous noise components, by simply introducing a weight function in the calculation process of a binaural Wiener filter. This weight function is calculated from the phase of the cross-spectrum of observed signals at the left/right ears. In this method, a speech source at the front of a head is regarded as a synchronous signal source, whereas noise sources at different azimuth angles of the speech source are regarded as asynchronous signal sources. In accordance with the weight function, only the asynchronous components are removed. In experiments using speech signals, ACC-WF worked effectively for speech enhancement. The simplicity of the procedure and the effectiveness of ACC-WF may make current binaural speech enhancement systems faster and more reliable.