Generalized Sidelobe Canceller Research Articles

Multi-apodization with cross-correlation combined with generalized sidelobe canceller applied to ultrasound imaging.

Beamforming is vital for medical ultrasound imaging systems. The generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) beamforming can improve the image quality of lateral resolution, but its performance improvement in contrast and robustness is limited. This paper proposes an improved generalized sidelobe canceller algorithm based on multi-apodization with cross-correlation (MAXB-IGSC), which aims to improve the contrast and robustness of ultrasound imaging while maintaining the high image resolution and background speckle quality of GSC. The proposed MAXB-IGSC uses multiple pairs of complementary received apodization functions to process the echo data individually to obtain multiple pairs of data sets. The average of their normalized cross-correlation coefficients is then calculated and utilized to determine the adaptive subarray length of the GSC covariance matrix and weights the output of the improved GSC. The MAXB-IGSC improves the contrast ratio (CR) by 171.18% in anechoic cyst simulation and by 91.23%/130.97%/171.76% in geabr_0 (a dataset from the University of Michigan) experiment compared with GSC, respectively. Furthermore, MAXB-IGSC exhibits significant noise immunity, which greatly improves the robustness of the imaging. The technology also maintains the brightness and uniformity of the background speckle. The proposed MAXB-IGSC has potential for obtaining high-quality ultrasound images in clinical applications.

Retracted: Sidelobe Reduction in NC-OFDM-Based CRNs Using Differential Evolution-Assisted Generalized Sidelobe Canceller

Retracted: Sidelobe Reduction in NC-OFDM-Based CRNs Using Differential Evolution-Assisted Generalized Sidelobe Canceller

A nested generalized sidelobe canceller for source counting, localization, and signal separation in reverberant fields

This paper proposes a nested generalized sidelobe canceller (NGSC) for typical array signal processing tasks, including source counting, localization, and signal separation. Multiple blocking matrices are arranged in a nested structure to successively eliminate dominant sources until the remaining signal is predominantly incoherent noise. The microphone signals are dereverberated using a multichannel weighted prediction error algorithm. In source counting, the number of sound sources is determined by tracking the average power of the blocked signal. In source localization, the direction-of-arrival (DOA) is estimated via cosine similarity in conjunction with the golden section search. In signal separation, the estimated DOA enables speech separation in a linearly constrained minimum variance beamformer with postfiltering (LCMV-PF). Monte Carlo simulations are performed to compare the proposed NGSC approach with four baselines, minimum description length, second order statistic of the eigenvalue, multistage Wiener filtering, and multiple signal classification. The results show that NGSC achieves at least 28.80% higher source counting accuracy with a 1.04° lower root mean square degree error than the baselines. The signal-to-distortion ratio achieved by LCMV-PF is 1.52 dB higher than that achieved by the linearly constrained minimum power beamformer and the multichannel Wiener filter.

Multiple Generalized Sidelobe Cancellers for Minimization of Interference in Cognitive Radio System

Multiple Generalized Sidelobe Cancellers for Minimization of Interference in Cognitive Radio System

Parallel processing of distributed beamforming and multichannel linear prediction for speech denoising and deverberation in wireless acoustic sensor networks

More and more smart home devices with microphones come into our life in these years; it is highly desirable to connect these microphones as wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) so that these devices can be better controlled in an enclosure. For indoor applications, both environmental noise and room reverberation may severely degrade speech quality, and thus both of them need to be removed to improve users’ experience. For this goal, this paper proposes a parallel processing framework of distributed beamforming and multichannel linear prediction (DB-BFMCLP), which consists of generalized sidelobe canceler and multichannel linear prediction for simultaneous speech dereverberation and noise reduction in WASNs. By sharing a common desired response vector, the proposed DB-BFMCLP can provide a significant reduction in communication bandwidth without sacrificing performance. The convergence guarantee of the DB-BFMCLP to its centralized implementation is derived mathematically. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed method to the existing related methods in noisy and reverberant scenarios.

Interference Suppression in EEG Dipole Source Localization through Reduced-Rank Beamforming

In this paper, we propose new neural activity indices for the solution of the inverse problem of localizing sources of cortical activity from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements. Such indices are based on reduced-rank beamformers, specifically the generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC), and with the purpose of suppressing the contribution of interfering sources and noise. Here, the GSC is modified with an adaptive blocking matrix (ABM) to optimally estimate and later suppress unwanted brain sources. With respect to the rank-reduction, this is achieved through the cross-spectral metrics (CSM) as they give a sense of the affinity of the beamformers’ eigenstructure to the orthogonal subspace of noise an interference. Based on that, two different neural indices are proposed for the assessment of brain activation. Our realistic simulations show that a more consistent source localization is achieved through the proposed indices in comparison to the use of the traditional full-rank approach, specifically for brain sources embedded in high background activity that originates at the brain cortex and thalamus. We also prove the applicability of our methods on the localization of sources on the visual cortex produced by steady-state visual-evoked potentials.

Dual projection generalized sidelobe canceller based on mixed signal subspace for ultrasound imaging.

In this paper, we propose a dual projection generalized sidelobe canceller (DPGSC) based on mixed subspace (MS) for ultrasound imaging, which aims to improve the speckle signal-noise-ratio (sSNR) and decrease the dark-region artifacts. A mixed signal subspace based on the correlation between the desired steering vector and the eigenvectors is constructed to further optimize the desired steering vector and the final weight vector. The simulated and experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly improve the speckle uniformity. In the geabr_0 experiment, the standard deviation of background and sSNR of MS-DPGSC can be improved by 48.07% and 58.49% more than those of eigenspace-based generalized sidelobe canceller (ESGSC). Furthermore, for a hyperechoic target, the maximal improvement of contrast ratio is 95.29%. In terms of anechoic cyst, the contrast-to-noise ratio of MS-DPGSC is increased by 123.08% than that of ESGSC. The rat mammary tumor experimental data show that the proposed method has better comprehensive imaging effect than traditional generalized sidelobe cancellers and ESGSCs.

Supervised speech separation combined with adaptive beamforming

Microphone arrays are a powerful tool for ambient noise suppression. A multi-channel minimum mean square error (MMSE) solution can be factorized into a minimum variance distortionless response beamformer (MVDR) followed by a single-channel Wiener post-filter. MVDR beamformer, as well as its equivalent form of generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC), often does not provide sufficient noise reduction due to its limited ability to reduce diffuse noise and reverberation. Steering and calibration errors also degrade the performance of both MVDR and GSC beamformers. Post-filter can be realized by any single-channel noise reduction method. A modern and promising approach for single-channel noise reduction is formulated as a supervised speech separation (SSS) in which a supervised learning algorithm, typically a deep neural network (DNN), is trained to learn a mapping from the noisy features to a time-frequency representation of the target of interest. In this paper, we combined SSS and adaptive beamforming approaches. Adaptive beamforming is realized by simplified GSC (S-GSC) whose equivalence with MVDR beamformer is also proved in the paper. In the proposed S-GSC beamformer, the conventional beamformer is replaced by the central microphone signal. Steering towards the target speaker needs no direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Trained DNN of the SSS module estimates ideal ratio mask (IRM) which is used for adaptation of the blocking matrix, calibration of the microphones, adaptation for the adaptive noise canceller, and the post-filtering. The proposed method was tested on 720 utterances of the TIMIT database used as target speech. The reverberant room was simulated by acoustic impulse responses recorded in the real room. Performance analysis was carried out with PESQ, STOI, and SDR measures. The test results showed that the proposed combined method outperforms the individual SSS and S-GSC methods.

Determinant-Based Generalized Sidelobe Canceller for Dual-Sensor Noise Reduction

Reducing the adverse effects of noises is one of the key issues for successful signal processing. For decades, there have been numerous studies to achieve this goal. Among them, dual-sensor noise reduction has been widely studied due to its rather high performance with comparatively low cost. In this paper, we propose a novel dual–sensor noise reduction method named a determinant-based generalized sidelobe canceller. As given in the graphical abstract, it is a two-stage noise reduction technique, wherein an input signal is primarily filtered by a determinant-based Wiener filter and then a subsequent noise canceller removes residual noises by utilizing the determinant-based adaptation mode controller. To update the coefficients of the noise canceller for noise-only regions, the output of the more reliable determinant-based signal activity detector is employed. For performance evaluation, five objective measures, the mean opinion score, and spectrograms of the proposed and other competing methods are estimated for both simulation and real data sets. Through the evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the others in almost all aspects, especially when multiple noises interfere or reverberation exists.

Sidelobe Reduction in NC-OFDM-Based CRNs Using Differential Evolution-Assisted Generalized Sidelobe Canceller

Noncontiguous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NC-OFDM) is considered a suitable candidate for the cognitive radio network (CRN) to accomplish efficient data transmission. The NC-OFDM allows secondary users (SUs) to access the primary user (PU) spectrum while being detected idle. However, interference may occur in the adjacent frequency bands of the PU due to sidelobes of the SU transmission. The use of cancellation carriers (CCs) and generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) is a widely adopted technique to tackle the sidelobes. To this end, this paper presents a differential evolution- (DE-) based GSC (DE-GSC) scheme to suppress unwanted sidelobes. At first, in the DE-GSC1 scheme, the adaptive weight vector is calculated using the DE algorithm while considering the complete samples of the sidelobes for optimization. The optimized weights are then added with the original weights to reduce the sidelobe issue. Next, in the DE-GSC2 scheme, selected elements for the adaptive weight vector near the main NC-OFDM signal are computed using the DE to reduce the search space. The performance of the proposed methods in terms of power spectral density (PSD) is compared with some of the recent techniques employing five different scenarios. Simulation results in the presence of single and multiple spectral hole scenarios validate that the proposed DE-GSC1 and DE-GSC2 methods result in enhanced suppression performance compared with the: original signal, simple CC, simple GSC, DE-based CC (DE-CC), and genetic algorithm- (GA-) based CC (GA-CC) schemes.

Generalized sidelobe canceler beamforming combined with Eigenspace-Wiener postfilter for medical ultrasound imaging.

BACKGROUND: The beamforming algorithm is key to the image quality of the medical ultrasound system. The generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) beamforming can improve the image quality in lateral resolution, but the contrast is not improved correspondingly.OBJECTIVE: In our research, we try to optimize the generalized sidelobe canceler to obtain images that achieve an improvement in both lateral resolution and contrast.METHODS: We put forward a new beamforming algorithm which combines the generalized sidelobe canceler and Eigenspace-Wiener postfilter. According to eigenspace decomposition of the covariance matrix of the received data, the components of the Wiener postfilter can be calculated from the signal matrix and the noise matrix. Then, the adaptive weight vector of GSC is further constrained by the Eigenspace-Wiener postfilter, which make the output energy of the receiving array closer to the desired signal than the conventional GSC output.RESULTS: We compare the new beamforming algorithm with delay-and-sum (DS) beamforming, synthetic aperture (SA) beamforming, and GSC beamforming using the simulated and experimental data sets. The quantitative results show that our method reduces the FWHM by 85.5%, 80.5%, and 38.9% while improving the CR by 123.6%, 47.7%, 84.4% on basis of DS, SA, and GSC beamforming, respectively.CONCLUSIONS: The new beamforming algorithm can obviously improve the imaging quality of medical ultrasound imaging systems in both lateral resolution and contrast.

Adaptive orientational beamforming techniques for narrowband interference rejection

In this paper, the adaptive theory of the orientational beamforming (OBF) system is investigated. Three adaptive OBF algorithms, namely the orientational maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (O-MSINR), the orientational linearly constrained minimum variance (O-LCMV), and the orientational generalized sidelobe canceller (O-GSC) algorithms, are proposed to reject narrowband interferences (NBIs) and recover the desired ultra-wideband (UWB) signal in the OBF system. They are developed by applying adaptive techniques in conventional directional beamforming systems to the OBF system, taking into account the similarities and differences between the OBF system and the conventional beamforming system. These algorithms are constructed on the orientation dimension, and orientational constraints instead of directional constraints are used to guarantee an orientational gain. Therefore, they are independent of signal directions. This perfectly solves the problem when an NBI has the same direction as the desired UWB signal, which current adaptive beamforming algorithms cannot handle. If all the NBIs have the same center frequency, the three algorithms work effectively regardless of the number of NBIs. If all the NBIs have different center frequencies, the O-LCMV and O-GSC algorithms outperform the O-MSINR algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms significantly reduce the bit error rates as compared with the original OBF system.

Reduced‐rank space‐time adaptive processing algorithm based on multistage selections of angle‐Doppler filters

A new reduced-rank (RR) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithm based on multistage selections of angle-Doppler filters is proposed in the form of a generalised sidelobe canceller. First, two types of the RR auxiliary angle-Doppler filters are designed based on the discrete Fourier basis functions. Then, a novel multistage method is implemented to select the angle-Doppler filters by using the cross-correlation observed at the current stage and the residual output observed at the previous stage. Finally, the asymptotic statistic performance of target detection is evaluated in terms of the conventional framework of STAP for the cases of both known and unknown covariance, which shows that the proposed algorithm is capable of providing the constant false alarm rate. Numerical examples are provided, and they demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to offer better performance than the existing sparsity-based and the conventional reduced-dimension algorithms under the intrinsic clutter motion and array gain and phase errors.

Cross Subaperture Averaging Generalized Sidelobe Canceler Beamforming Applied to Medical Ultrasound Imaging

For adaptive ultrasound imaging, a reliable estimation of the covariance matrix has a decisive influence on the performance of beamformers. In this paper, we propose a new cross subaperture averaging generalized sidelobe canceler approach (GSC-CROSS) for medical ultrasound imaging, which uses the cross-covariance matrix instead of the traditional covariance matrix estimation. By using the more stable and accurate estimation of the covariance matrix, GSC-CROSS performs well in both lateral resolution and contrast. Experiments are conducted based on the simulated echo data of scattering points and a cyst target. Beamforming responses of scattering points show that GSC-CROSS can improve the lateral resolution by 76.9%, 68.8%, and 17.1% compared with delay-and-sum (DS), synthetic aperture (SA), and the traditional generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC), respectively. Also, imaging of the cyst target shows that compared with DS, SA, and GSC, the contrast increases by 101%, 32.6%, and 63.5%, respectively. Finally, the actual echo data collected from a medical ultrasonic imaging system is applied to reconstruct the image. Results show that the proposed method has a good performance on lateral resolution and contrast. Both the simulated and experimental data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Modified GSC Method to Reduce the Distortion of the Enhanced Speech Signal Using Cross-Correlation and Sidelobe Neutralization

The generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) method is a common algorithm to enhance audio signals using a microphone array. Distortion of the enhanced audio signal consists of two parts: the residual acoustic noise and the distortion of the desired audio signal, which means that the desired audio signal is damaged. This paper proposes a modified GSC method to reduce both kinds of distortion when the desired audio signal is a non-stationary speech signal. First, the cross-correlation coefficient between the canceling signal and the error signal of the least mean square (LMS) algorithm was added to the adaptive process of the GSC method to reduce the distortion of the enhanced signal while the energy of the desired signal frame was increased suddenly. The sidelobe pattern of beamforming was then presented to estimate the noise signal in the beamforming output signal of the GSC method. The noise component of the beamforming output signal was decreased by subtracting the estimated noise signal to improve the denoising performance of the GSC method. Finally, the GSC-SN-MCC method was proposed by merging the above two methods. The experiment was performed in an anechoic chamber to validate the proposed method in various SNR conditions. Furthermore, the simulated calculation with inaccurate noise directions was conducted based on the experiment data to inspect the robustness of the proposed method to the error of the estimated noise direction. The experiment data and calculation results indicated that the proposed method could reduce the distortion effectively under various SNR conditions and would not cause more distortion if the estimated noise direction is far from the actual noise direction.

The Influence of Signal Incident Angle on Generalized Sidelobe Cancellation System

Through the simulation modeling of the generalized sidelobe cancellation system, the influence of the interference signal and expected signal at different incident angles on the system is analyzed. The results show that the cancellation ratio is affected by the expected signal, the interference signal and the original beam pattern, and the expected signal loss factor is affected by the angle of incidence of the expected signal. At the same time, the influence of the angle deviation of the interference signal on the system is simulated, and the result shows that the angle deviation of the cancellation ratio is very sensitive to the angle deviation from the beginning to the later.

Signed Convex Combination of Fast Convergence Algorithm to Generalized Sidelobe Canceller Beamformer for Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement

In speech communication applications such as teleconferences, mobile phones, etc., the real-time noises degrade the desired speech quality and intelligibility. For these applications, in the case of multichannel speech enhancement, the adaptive beamforming algorithms play a major role compared to fixed beamforming algorithms. Among the adaptive beamformers, Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (GSC) beamforming with Least Mean Square (LMS) Algorithm has the least complexity but provides poor noise reduction whereas GSC beamforming with Combined LMS (CLMS) algorithm has better noise reduction performance but with high computational complexity. In order to achieve a tradeoff between noise reduction and computational complexity in real-time noisy conditions, a Signed Convex Combination of Fast Convergence (SCCFC) algorithm based GSC beamforming for multi-channel speech enhancement is proposed. This proposed SCCFC algorithm is implemented using a signed convex combination of two Fast Convergence Normalized Least Mean Square (FCNLMS) adaptive filters with different step-sizes. This improves the overall performance of the GSC beamformer in real-time noisy conditions as well as reduces the computation complexity when compared to the existing GSC algorithms. The performance of the proposed multi-channel speech enhancement system is evaluated using the standard speech processing performance metrics. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GSC-SCCFC beamformer over the traditional methods.

Deep neural network-based generalized sidelobe canceller for dual-channel far-field speech recognition

The traditional generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) is a common speech enhancement front end to improve the noise robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in the far-field cases. However, the traditional GSC is optimized based on the signal level criteria, causing it not to guarantee the optimal ASR performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel dual-channel deep neural network (DNN)-based GSC structure, called nnGSC, which is optimized by using the objective of maximizing the ASR performance. Our key idea is to make each module of the traditional GSC fully learnable and use the acoustic model to perform joint optimization with GSC. We use the coefficients of the traditional GSC to initialize nnGSC, so that both traditional signal processing knowledge and large amounts of data can be used to guide the network learning. In addition, nnGSC can automatically track the target direction-of-arrival (DOA) frame-by-frame without the need for additional localization algorithms. In the experiments, nnGSC achieves a relative character error rate (CER) improvement of 23.7% compared to the microphone observation, 13.5% compared to the oracle direction-based super-directive beamformer, 12.2% compared to the oracle direction-based traditional GSC and 5.9% compared to the oracle mask-based minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer. Moreover, we can improve the robustness of nnGSC against array geometry mismatches by training with multi-geometry data.

A Robust Dual-Microphone Generalized Sidelobe Canceller Using a Bone-Conduction Sensor for Speech Enhancement.

The use of multiple spatially distributed microphones allows performing spatial filtering along with conventional temporal filtering, which can better reject the interference signals, leading to an overall improvement of the speech quality. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-microphone generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) algorithm assisted by a bone-conduction (BC) sensor for speech enhancement, which is named BC-assisted GSC (BCA-GSC) algorithm. The BC sensor is relatively insensitive to the ambient noise compared to the conventional air-conduction (AC) microphone. Hence, BC speech can be analyzed to generate very accurate voice activity detection (VAD), even in a high noise environment. The proposed algorithm incorporates the VAD information obtained by the BC speech into the adaptive blocking matrix (ABM) and adaptive noise canceller (ANC) in GSC. By using VAD to control ABM and combining VAD with signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) to control ANC, the proposed method could suppress interferences and improve the overall performance of GSC significantly. It is verified by experiments that the proposed GSC system not only improves speech quality remarkably but also boosts speech intelligibility.

A Knowledge-Based Auxiliary Channel STAP for Target Detection in Shipborne HFSWR

The broadened first-order sea clutter in shipborne high frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR), which will mask the targets with low radial velocity, is a kind of classical space–time coupled clutter. Space–time adaptive processing (STAP) has been proven to be an effective clutter suppression algorithm for space-time coupled clutter. To further improve the efficiency of clutter suppression, a STAP method based on a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) structure, named as the auxiliary channel STAP, was introduced into shipborne HFSWR. To obtain precise clutter information for the clutter covariance matrix (CCM) estimation, an approach based on the prior knowledge to auxiliary channel selection is proposed. Auxiliary channels are selected along the clutter ridge of the first-order sea clutter, whose distribution can be determined by the system parameters and regarded as pre-knowledge. To deal with the heterogeneity of the spreading first-order sea clutter, an innovative training samples selection approach according to the Riemannian distance is presented. The range cells that had shorter Riemannian distances to the cell under test (CUT) were chosen as training samples. Experimental results with measured data verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the comparison with the existing clutter suppression algorithms showed the superiority of the algorithm.