A Tradeoff Beamformer for Noise Reduction in the Spherical Harmonic Domain
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
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Authors:
Jarrett, Daniel P. (Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK )
Habets, Emanuël A. P. (International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany)
Benesty, Jacob (INRS-EMT, University of Quebec, 800 de la Gauchetiere Ouest, Suite 6900, Montreal, Quebec, Canada)
Naylor, Patrick A. (Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom)
Abstract:
Spherical microphone arrays present the advantage of enabling a three dimensional analysis of the sound field that can be described efficiently in the spherical harmonic domain. In this paper, we present a tradeoff beamformer which operates in this domain and enables a compromise between noise reduction and speech distortion. The experimental results obtained using simulated data demonstrate the beamformer’s ability to reduce high levels of coherent noise with low speech distortion. With a 32 microphone array in the presence of one interfering talker and signal to coherent noise ratios as low as -40 dB, the beamformer is able to achieve an array gain of up to 72 dB while retaining good speech quality. Index Terms — Speech enhancement, noise reduction, spherical harmonic domain, spherical microphone arrays.