Print Email Facebook Twitter A Study on Reference Microphone Selection for Multi-Microphone Speech Enhancement Title A Study on Reference Microphone Selection for Multi-Microphone Speech Enhancement Author Zhang, Jie (University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei) Chen, Huawei (Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Hendriks, R.C. (TU Delft Signal Processing Systems) Date 2020 Abstract Multi-microphone speech enhancement methods typically require a reference position with respect to which the target signal is estimated. Often, this reference position is arbitrarily chosen as one of the reference microphones. However, it has been shown that the choice of the reference microphone can have a significant impact on the final noise reduction performance. In this paper, we therefore theoretically analyze the impact of selecting a reference on the noise reduction performance with near-end noise being taken into account. Following the generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD) based optimal variable span filtering framework, we find that for any linear beamformer, the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) taking both the near-end and far-end noise into account is reference dependent. Only when the near-end noise is neglected, the output SNR of rank-1 beamformers does not depend on the reference position. However, in general for rank-r beamformers with r>1 (e.g., the multichannel Wiener filter) the performance does depend on the reference position. Based on these, we propose an optimal algorithm for microphone reference selection that maximizes the output SNR. In addition, we propose a lower-complexity algorithm that is still optimal for rank-1 beamformers, but sub-optimal for the general rank-r beamformers. Experiments using a simulated microphone array validate the effectiveness of both proposed methods and show that in terms of quality, several dB can be gained by selecting the proper reference microphone. Subject Acoustic distortionArray signal processinglow-rank approximationMicrophone arraysMicrophonesmulti-channel beamformingNoise reductionreference microphonerelative acoustic transfer functionSignal to noise ratioSpeech enhancementvariable span linear filters To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:da333e94-0495-42eb-b3ee-3ea0ce8acbd8 DOI https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2020.3039930 ISSN 2329-9290 Source IEEE - ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 29 (2021), 671-683 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2020 Jie Zhang, Huawei Chen, R.C. Hendriks Files PDF 09272831.pdf 2.27 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:da333e94-0495-42eb-b3ee-3ea0ce8acbd8/datastream/OBJ/view