Robust blind source separation in a reverberant room based on beamforming with a large-aperture microphone array

Josue Sanz-Robinson, Liechao Huang, Tiffany Moy, Warren Rieutort-Louis, Yingzhe Hu, Sigurd Wagner, James C. Sturm, Naveen Verma

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Large-Area Electronics (LAE) technology has enabled the development of physically-expansive sensing systems with a flexible form-factor, including large-aperture microphone arrays. We propose an approach to blind source separation based on leveraging such an array. In our algorithm we carry out delay-sum beamforming, but use frequency-dependent time delays, making it well-suited for a practical reverberant room. This is followed by a binary mask stage for further interference cancellation. A key feature is that it is fully «blind», since it requires no prior information about the location of the speakers or microphones. Instead, we carry out k-means cluster analysis, to estimate time delays in the background from acquired audio signals that represent the mixture of simultaneous sources. We have tested this algorithm in a conference room (T60 = 350 ms), using two linear arrays consisting of: (1) commercial electret capsules, and (2) LAE microphones, fabricated in-house. We have achieved high-quality separation results, obtaining a mean PESQ MOS improvement (relative to the unprocessed signal) for the electret array of 0.7 for two sources and 0.6 for four simultaneous sources, and for the LAE array of 0.5 and 0.3, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages440-444
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781479999880
DOIs
StatePublished - May 18 2016
Event41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016 - Shanghai, China
Duration: Mar 20 2016Mar 25 2016

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
Volume2016-May
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Other

Other41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period3/20/163/25/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Keywords

  • BSS
  • LAE
  • beamforming
  • large-area electronics
  • microphone array
  • reverberant room
  • source separation

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