Speech Acquisition and Enhancement in a Reverberant, Cocktail-Party-Like Environment

Developing a successful multi-microphone speech acquisition system in a reverberant, cocktail-party-like environment is a very challenging problem since both interfering sources and reverberation need to be well controlled. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on blind SIMO identification. We first blindly identify the channels from the interfering sources to all the microphones. Then we extract the speech signal of interest. Finally speech dereverberation is performed using the MINT method. Simulations with acoustic impulse responses measured in the varechoic chamber at Bell Labs are carried out to verify the proposed algorithm.