Real-time dual-microphone speech enhancement using field programmable gate arrays

The paper discusses an implementation of a dual-microphone phase-based speech enhancement technique. By using the phases of the incoming sound signals, we mask frequencies with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between the two microphones. Phase-based filtering can achieve high SNR gains with just two microphones, making it ideal for hand-held devices. However, these devices have a limited battery life and lack the processing power needed for a software based implementation. The paper presents a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation that was designed specifically for low-power operation. The FPGA based implementation is compared, with respect to processing capabilities and power utilization, with an off-the-shelf low-power digital signal processor (DSP) implementation.