Detecting multiple, simultaneous talkers through localising speech recorded by ad-hoc microphone arrays

This paper proposes a novel approach to detecting multiple, simultaneous talkers in multi-party meetings using localisation of active speech sources recorded with an ad-hoc microphone array. Cues indicating the relative distance between sources and microphones are derived from speech signals and room impulse responses recorded by each of the microphones distributed at unknown locations within a room. Multiple active sources are localised by analysing a surface formed from these cues and derived at different locations within the room. The number of localised active sources per each frame or utterance is then counted to estimate when multiple sources are active. The proposed approach does not require prior information about the number and locations of sources or microphones. Synchronisation between microphones is also not required. A meeting scenario with competing speakers is simulated and results show that simultaneously active sources can be detected with an average accuracy of 75% and the number of active sources counted accurately 65% of the time

Collaborative blind source separation using location informed spatial microphones

This letter presents a new Collaborative Blind Source Separation (CBSS) technique that uses a pair of location informed coincident microphone arrays to jointly separate simultaneous speech sources based on time-frequency source localization estimates from each microphone recording. While existing BSS approaches are based on localization estimates of sparse time-frequency components, the proposed approach can also recover non-sparse (overlapping) time-frequency components. The proposed method has been evaluated using up to three simultaneous speech sources under both anechoic and reverberant conditions. Results from objective and subjective measures of the perceptual quality of the separated speech show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing BSS approaches. © 1994-2012 IEEE