Experimental study of generalized subspace filters for the cocktail party situation

This paper investigates the potential performance of generalized subspace filters for speech enhancement in cocktail party situations with very poor signal/noise ratio, e.g. down to -15 dB. Performance metrics output signal/noise ratio, signal/distortion ratio, speech quality rating and speech intelligibility rating are mapped as functions of two algorithm parameters, revealing clear trade-off options between noise, distortion and subjective performances and a recommended choice of trade-off. Given sufficiently good noise statistics, SNR improvements around 20 dB as well as PESQ quality and STOI intelligibility rating improvements exceeding 1.0 and 0.2 points respectively are found. This shows the potential of the method.