Multiple-nulls-steering beamformer based on both talker and noise direction-of-arrival estimation
Masato Nakayama, Takanobu Nishiura, Yoichi Yamashita, Noboru Nakasako · Nippon Onkyo Gakkaishi/Acoustical science and technology/Nihon Onkyo Gakkaishi · 2013
Beamforming with a microphone-array is an ideal candidate for distant-talking speech recognition. An adaptive beamformer can achieve beamforming with a small microphone-array, but it had difficulty extracting distant-moving speech and reducing moving noises, because it must rapidly train long multiple-channel adaptive filters by using observed noises with a microphone-array. However, if positions of both talkers and noises can be estimated, adaptive filters may not need to be trained in real noisy environments. Therefore, we propose a multiple-nulls-steering beamformer based on both talker and noise localization that does not require adaptive training with observed noises. Finally, we confirmed the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method through computer simulations and evaluation experiments in real noisy environments.