Musical-Noise-Free Blind Speech Extraction Using ICA-Based Noise Estimation with Channel Selection

Conference: IWAENC 2012 - International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement
09/04/2012 - 09/06/2012 at Aachen, Germany

Proceedings: IWAENC 2012

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

Personal VDE Members are entitled to a 10% discount on this title

Authors:
Miyazaki, Ryoichi; Saruwatari, Hiroshi; Shikano, Kiyohiro (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, 630-0192 Japan)
Kondo, Kazunobu (Yamaha Corporate Research & Development Center, Shizuoka, 438-0192 Japan)

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a modified musical-noise-free blind spatial subtraction array (BSSA) based on ICA-based iterative noise estimation with channel selection. In our previous study, we have proposed a modified BSSA consisting of dynamic noise estimation by ICA and musical-noise-free iterative spectral subtraction (SS), where multiple iterative SS are applied to each of channels. This method achieves less musical noise property, but instead always suffers from large speech distortion because of no justification of applying ICA to such signals nonlinearly distorted by SS. In this paper, first, we theoretically clarify that the degradation in ICA obeys an amplitude variation in room transfer functions between the target user and microphones. Next, we introduce a channel selection strategy into ICA, where we automatically choose less varied inputs to maintain high accuracy of noise estimation. From objective and subjective evaluations, we reveal that the proposed method outperforms the conventional method. Index Terms — Blind speech extraction, musical-noise-free, higher-order statistics, channel selection