Adaptive Blocking Beamformer for Speech Separation

This paper tackles the speech separation problem in a meeting room using a new acoustic beamforming method – adaptive blocking (AB) beamformer. The proposed method is an optimum beamforming with a structure similar to the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) structure, but simpler. Thus, it inherits the flexibility of GSC and functions well in dynamic environments. We investigate the performance of the proposed method through different experiments and compare the results with a GSC beamformer for minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR). The experimental setups include one wanted speaker, two interferers, air conditioner noise and uncorrelated sensor noise. AB provides improvement over MVDR-GSC.

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