Spatial filtration of sound for multimedia systems

This paper deals with the problem of receiving of a desired signal in noisy or "cocktail-party" conditions. This problem is vital in many domains, such as communications, multimedia (multimodal interaction), speech recognition, and psychoacoustics (hearing prostheses). It can be partially solved by classical filtering techniques, however these techniques often introduce distortions into the filtered signal. Spatial filtration can be performed based on an artificial neural network (ANN). Such an algorithm is elaborated, and some details concerning its implementation are described. Moreover, results of experiments are presented. These results demonstrate that an ANN-based nonlinear filter increases the signal-to-noise ratio and improves speech intelligibility.