Speech Signal Enhancement under Multiple Interferences Using Transfer Function Ratio Beamformer

Abstract

In many practical environments, the desired speech signal is usually contaminated not only by stationary noise but also nonstationay interferences, such as competing speech. This paper proposes a speech enhancement method which can extract desired speech in a multiple interferences and reverberant environment. The proposed method uses transfer function ratio beamformer and multi-channel adaptive filter algorithm. The virtual sound source concept is proposed to simplify the theoretical treatment for multiple competing speeches. In addition, a transfer function ratio estimation method in a more practical scenario is also proposed. The experiments are performed in a real room acoustic environment.