Interferences suppression using two closely-spaced microphones

Interferences, especially competing speakers, significantly influence speech intelligibility. In this paper, we propose an interference suppression method using only two closely-spaced microphones. Firstly, a 1st-order hypercardioid differential microphone array (DMA) with white noise gain (WNG) constraint is designed in the STFT domain, which solves the amplification problem of DMA on incoherent noise and allows post-filter techniques in the STFT domain. Secondly, based on a hybrid coherence model, the Wiener gain as the post-filter is directly estimated without a prior knowledge of interference direction, so that the difficulties in estimating noise statistics is avoided. The performances are evaluated in different noisy scenarios, including different reverberation time, different room sizes, as well as different number of competing talkers. The results show that the proposed method achieves significant and constant improvements on interference suppressing, speech distortion, and overall speech quality.

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