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

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 dela...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 440 - 444
Main Authors Sanz-Robinson, Josue, Liechao Huang, Moy, Tiffany, Rieutort-Louis, Warren, Yingzhe Hu, Wagner, Sigurd, Sturm, James C., Verma, Naveen
Format Conference Proceeding Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2016
Subjects
Algorithm design and analysis
Algorithms
Array signal processing
Arrays
beamforming
BSS
Conferences
Delay effects
Electrets
Electronics
LAE
large-area electronics
microphone array
Microphone arrays
Microphones
reverberant room
Signal processing
source separation
Time delay
Time-frequency analysis
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Summary: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.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
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SourceType-Conference Papers & Proceedings-2
ISSN:2379-190X
DOI:10.1109/ICASSP.2016.7471713