Synchronization for classical blind source separation algorithms in wireless acoustic sensor networks

Abstract

The use of wireless acoustic sensor networks is becoming very popular since they entail many advantages. However, this type of distributed sensor networks has an important drawback for many signal processing algorithms, the synchronization problem. Broadly speaking, in those networks, signals received at the different nodes are not synchronized due to two main factors, the clock problem and the important differences in propagation delays between sources and microphones. In this work we introduce a synchronization solution for mixtures of two and three speech sources in the framework of blind source separation. This proposal of synchronization has a mixture alignment stage prior to apply the separation method. Obtained results demonstrate that this synchronization method aligns speech mixtures correctly since it improves the performance of the classical separation algorithm in terms of both speech quality and speech intelligibility.