Evaluating microphone arrays for a speaker identification task

Microphone array systems have been an area of active research for several years. The potential for high quality hands-free speech acquisition in noisy and reflecting environments makes microphone arrays an attractive alternative to conventional close-talking microphones. The signal-enhancement and sourcelocation capabilities of microphone arrays make them applicable to a variety of tasks including teleconferencing, speaker tracking, speaker recognition and speech recognition. In this paper we evaluate techniques for setting up microphone arrays for speaker identification. We propose the use of an active noise canceling beamformer based on the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) beamformer. Significant improvements in identification rate are achieved using this method compared to other beamforming techniques investigated in this paper.