Robust direction of arrival estimation for speech enhancement in noisy reverberant rooms
Thomas Lotter, Heinrich W. Loellmann, Peter Vary · IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing · 2002
This paper describes an eigendecomposition based approach to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of speech or noise sources in a reverberant room by using a microphone array. Unitary ESPRIT, a DOA estimation algorithm for narrowband signals, is applied to these wideband signals, which results in DOA estimates for each frequency. A single estimate is then obtained by means of a histogram. The estimated DOAs of the speech source are used to enhance a noisy speech signal by means of a superdirective beamformer. Experiments in a noisy reverberant room showed a higher estimation accuracy, and thus a better speech enhancement performance, at low SNRs compared to other DOA estimation techniques.