Separation of Multiple Speech Signals by usingTriangular Microphone Array

Abstract

Speech source separation has been an important topic to realize speech-based human-machine interfaces or high quality hand-free communication with machines. For source separation, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and time-frequency masking are powerful methods as a tool of Blind Source Separation (BSS) of speech mixtures. The latter method is based on the assumption called \W-Disjoint Orthogonality" which implies the cell component sparsity of speech in the time-frequency domain. One of the topics treated in this article is to introduce the time-frequency masking scheme is applied to the equilateral triangular array where the three delay estimates from each microphone pairs are obtained. In addition, it is used to improve histogram-mapping algorithm by integrate and coordinate transformation of three delay estimates. Some experiments in real environment for separating multiple sources are performed to verify the effectiveness.