Beamformer improvement with increasing number of sensors

The two-sensor frequency-banded minimum-variance beamformer (FBMVB) [Lockwood et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 2278 (1999)], shown to extract a target speech signal from multiple interfering speech sources, is extended to three and four sensors. The extended FBMVB retains the real-time computational...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2001-05, Vol.109 (5_Supplement), p.2494-2494
Main Authors: Berry, Matthew J., Lockwood, Michael E., Jones, Douglas L., Bilger, Robert C., Lansing, Charissa R., O’Brien, William D., Wheeler, Bruce C., Feng, Albert S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The two-sensor frequency-banded minimum-variance beamformer (FBMVB) [Lockwood et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 2278 (1999)], shown to extract a target speech signal from multiple interfering speech sources, is extended to three and four sensors. The extended FBMVB retains the real-time computational advantages of the two-sensor FBMVB. Results from a battery of simulated and real acoustic environment tests suggest that the extended FBMVB offers better extraction of the target speech than the two-sensor FBMVB. Measuring the quality of extraction as signal-to-noise ratio gain and intelligibility-weighted signal-to-noise ratio gain, the extended FBMVB demonstrates performance improvements of 2–3 dB over the already high performance of the two-sensor FBMVB for most tests. In general, results suggest that the extended FBMVB is more robust with respect to crowded interferer settings and room reverberation.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4744877