Online Maximization of Subband Kurtosis for Blind Adaptive Beamforming in Realtime Speech Extraction

This paper presents a method for blind beamforming with application in realtime speech extraction in a non-stationary environment. The blind beamforming is carried out using an online kurtosis maximization approach where the optimization is based on Newton's method. The main novelty of the paper lies in the formulation of the subband kurtosis approximation, where a locally quadratic criterion is solved at each iteration. Further, a real-time digital signal processor (DSP) implementation of the method is conducted and results with real data is presented.