Speech activity detection and enhancement of a moving speaker based on the wideband generalized likelihood ratio and microphone arrays
Ilyas Potamitis, Eran Fishler · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
The subject of this work is a unifying treatment of estimating the Direction of Arrival (DOA), detecting speech activity and suppressing noise in the case of a moving speaker by using a linear microphone array. The approach is based on the generalized likelihood ratio test applied to the framework of far-field, wideband moving sources (W-GLRT). It is shown that under certain distributional assumptions the W-GLRT provides a framework for the evaluation of DOA measurements against spurious DOAs, probabilistic speech activity detection as well as speech enhancement. As regards speech enhancement, we demonstrate the direct connection of W-GLRT with enhancement based on subspace methods. In addition, through the concept of directive a priori SNR we demonstrate its indirect connection with Minimum Mean Square Error spectral (MMSE_SA) and log-spectral gain modification (MMSE_LSA). The efficiency of the approach is illustrated on a moving speaker when either additive white Gaussian or babble noise is present in the acoustical field at very low SNRs.