Enhanced, blind and robust far-field audio acquisition for portable devices
Renjie Tong, Zhongfu Ye · IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics · 2017
In this paper, a bilinear Wiener filtering method is proposed for multichannel audio acquisition without knowing the array configurations and frequency responses. Compared with mainstream algorithms, the proposed method has two important features: blindness and robustness. For the first feature, the method does not require any prior knowledge about the array manifold. The “blindness” is very attractive to the industry because even microphones picked from the same batch of the same manufacturer can be inconsistent. For the second feature, even in the presence of strong sensor noise, the method can yield a good performance in suppressing directional interferences. This helps bring better “robustness” to the method and make it more practical for real environments. In the method, a rectangular window is adopted to slide continuously over the parallel multichannel audio streams and then bilinear Wiener filtering is performed on the matrix denoting windowed parallel audio streams. Experiments in a recording studio show the method can suppress directional interferences well. Besides, it converges rapidly and is an appealing choice for consumer electronics.