MIMO beamforming system for speech enhancement in realistic environment with multiple noise sources

Abstract

Multiple noise sources in a realistic environment severely degrade the quality and intelligibility of the desired speech signal, thus posing a severe problem for many speech applications. Several noise reduction algorithms have been proposed with a main goal to solve this problem. However, the good performances of such algorithms are severely impaired in realistic environment under multi-noise sources condition. In this paper, the author treats the noise cancellation system as a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamformer system. The proposed approach consists of two steps. First, the noise signals are generated by applying the white noise sources to a MIMO AR system. Then, the noisy microphone signals are sequentially processed by employing multi-channel linear prediction error filters (MCLPEFs) and multi-channel adaptive noise estimation filters (MCANEFs) in the lower path of the proposed beamformer. The MCLPEFs are used to whiten the input signals, while the MCANEFs are used as a MIMO system identification to perform the modeling process of the noise signals. Finally, the noise signals in the upper path are subtracted from the estimated noises in the lower path to recover an enhanced speech signal. Moreover, the performance of the proposed MIMO approach was validated under a realistic environment with real noise sources.