Frame-wise speech extraction with recursive expectation maximization for partially deformable microphone arrays

Abstract

Large-apertured wearable and deformable microphone arrays have shown their better performance than conventional small wearable and rigid microphone arrays for speech extraction tasks, especially when the desired speech is far away from the arrays or there exist a great number of directional noises in practical applications. Most existing beamforming methods that require the information of the desired sound direction often cannot be used directly on deformable arrays because their shape might continuously change over time. To tackle the problem of utilizing partially deformable microphone arrays for target speech extraction, this paper derives a frame-wise speech extraction method, which is referred to as the recursive multichannel Wiener filter with generalized Gamma priors. In this method, the complex spectrum of the desired speech is assumed to follow a zero-mean complex Gaussian distribution with time-varying variance, and the reciprocal of this time-varying variance known as the precision is further assumed to follow a Gamma distribution, while the complex spectrum of the noise is assumed to follow a zero-mean complex Gaussian distribution. Under these two assumptions, we derive the recursive expectation maximization algorithm to extract the desired speech in a frame-by-frame manner. Experimental results show the promising performance of the proposed method in terms of multiple objective metrics.