13,665 research outputs found
Uplink beamforming for the FDD mode of UTRA
This paper presents some link level simulation results for the evaluation of adaptive antennas in the uplink of the FDD mode of UTRA (UMTS terrestrial radio access). Two families of algorithms were initially considered, the basic difference between them being their ability/disability to suppress the contribution from W-CDMA directional interfering sources. Two distinct schemes were established as representatives for each family and their performance was evaluated in presence of some illustrative interfering scenarios. In the light of the results it is shown that time-reference beamforming algorithms suffer from severe beam pattern distortion effects when applied as such. This in turn causes harsh performance degradation in terms of raw BER, especially at high SINR levels. It is shown that these shortcomings are essentially caused by the uplink multiplexing of the traffic channel, which is seen by the base station as a powerful interfering source coming from the direction of arrival of the desired user.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Block-Online Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement Using DNN-Supported Relative Transfer Function Estimates
This work addresses the problem of block-online processing for multi-channel
speech enhancement. Such processing is vital in scenarios with moving speakers
and/or when very short utterances are processed, e.g., in voice assistant
scenarios. We consider several variants of a system that performs beamforming
supported by DNN-based voice activity detection (VAD) followed by
post-filtering. The speaker is targeted through estimating relative transfer
functions between microphones. Each block of the input signals is processed
independently in order to make the method applicable in highly dynamic
environments. Owing to the short length of the processed block, the statistics
required by the beamformer are estimated less precisely. The influence of this
inaccuracy is studied and compared to the processing regime when recordings are
treated as one block (batch processing). The experimental evaluation of the
proposed method is performed on large datasets of CHiME-4 and on another
dataset featuring moving target speaker. The experiments are evaluated in terms
of objective and perceptual criteria (such as signal-to-interference ratio
(SIR) or perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), respectively).
Moreover, word error rate (WER) achieved by a baseline automatic speech
recognition system is evaluated, for which the enhancement method serves as a
front-end solution. The results indicate that the proposed method is robust
with respect to short length of the processed block. Significant improvements
in terms of the criteria and WER are observed even for the block length of 250
ms.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Modified version of the article
accepted for publication in IET Signal Processing journal. Original results
unchanged, additional experiments presented, refined discussion and
conclusion
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