75,353 research outputs found
Blind MultiChannel Identification and Equalization for Dereverberation and Noise Reduction based on Convolutive Transfer Function
This paper addresses the problems of blind channel identification and
multichannel equalization for speech dereverberation and noise reduction. The
time-domain cross-relation method is not suitable for blind room impulse
response identification, due to the near-common zeros of the long impulse
responses. We extend the cross-relation method to the short-time Fourier
transform (STFT) domain, in which the time-domain impulse responses are
approximately represented by the convolutive transfer functions (CTFs) with
much less coefficients. The CTFs suffer from the common zeros caused by the
oversampled STFT. We propose to identify CTFs based on the STFT with the
oversampled signals and the critical sampled CTFs, which is a good compromise
between the frequency aliasing of the signals and the common zeros problem of
CTFs. In addition, a normalization of the CTFs is proposed to remove the gain
ambiguity across sub-bands. In the STFT domain, the identified CTFs is used for
multichannel equalization, in which the sparsity of speech signals is
exploited. We propose to perform inverse filtering by minimizing the
-norm of the source signal with the relaxed -norm fitting error
between the micophone signals and the convolution of the estimated source
signal and the CTFs used as a constraint. This method is advantageous in that
the noise can be reduced by relaxing the -norm to a tolerance
corresponding to the noise power, and the tolerance can be automatically set.
The experiments confirm the efficiency of the proposed method even under
conditions with high reverberation levels and intense noise.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 5 table
Robust equalization of multichannel acoustic systems
In most real-world acoustical scenarios, speech signals captured by distant microphones from a source are reverberated due to multipath propagation, and the reverberation may impair speech intelligibility. Speech dereverberation can be achieved
by equalizing the channels from the source to microphones. Equalization systems can
be computed using estimates of multichannel acoustic impulse responses. However,
the estimates obtained from system identification always include errors; the fact that
an equalization system is able to equalize the estimated multichannel acoustic system does not mean that it is able to equalize the true system. The objective of this
thesis is to propose and investigate robust equalization methods for multichannel
acoustic systems in the presence of system identification errors.
Equalization systems can be computed using the multiple-input/output inverse theorem or multichannel least-squares method. However, equalization systems
obtained from these methods are very sensitive to system identification errors. A
study of the multichannel least-squares method with respect to two classes of characteristic channel zeros is conducted. Accordingly, a relaxed multichannel least-
squares method is proposed. Channel shortening in connection with the multiple-
input/output inverse theorem and the relaxed multichannel least-squares method is
discussed.
Two algorithms taking into account the system identification errors are developed. Firstly, an optimally-stopped weighted conjugate gradient algorithm is
proposed. A conjugate gradient iterative method is employed to compute the equalization system. The iteration process is stopped optimally with respect to system identification errors. Secondly, a system-identification-error-robust equalization
method exploring the use of error models is presented, which incorporates system
identification error models in the weighted multichannel least-squares formulation
Structure-Based Subspace Method for Multi-Channel Blind System Identification
In this work, a novel subspace-based method for blind identification of
multichannel finite impulse response (FIR) systems is presented. Here, we
exploit directly the impeded Toeplitz channel structure in the signal linear
model to build a quadratic form whose minimization leads to the desired channel
estimation up to a scalar factor. This method can be extended to estimate any
predefined linear structure, e.g. Hankel, that is usually encountered in linear
systems. Simulation findings are provided to highlight the appealing advantages
of the new structure-based subspace (SSS) method over the standard subspace
(SS) method in certain adverse identification scenarii.Comment: 5 pages, Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters, January 201
Online Localization and Tracking of Multiple Moving Speakers in Reverberant Environments
We address the problem of online localization and tracking of multiple moving
speakers in reverberant environments. The paper has the following
contributions. We use the direct-path relative transfer function (DP-RTF), an
inter-channel feature that encodes acoustic information robust against
reverberation, and we propose an online algorithm well suited for estimating
DP-RTFs associated with moving audio sources. Another crucial ingredient of the
proposed method is its ability to properly assign DP-RTFs to audio-source
directions. Towards this goal, we adopt a maximum-likelihood formulation and we
propose to use an exponentiated gradient (EG) to efficiently update
source-direction estimates starting from their currently available values. The
problem of multiple speaker tracking is computationally intractable because the
number of possible associations between observed source directions and physical
speakers grows exponentially with time. We adopt a Bayesian framework and we
propose a variational approximation of the posterior filtering distribution
associated with multiple speaker tracking, as well as an efficient variational
expectation-maximization (VEM) solver. The proposed online localization and
tracking method is thoroughly evaluated using two datasets that contain
recordings performed in real environments.Comment: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 201
Multichannel Speech Separation and Enhancement Using the Convolutive Transfer Function
This paper addresses the problem of speech separation and enhancement from
multichannel convolutive and noisy mixtures, \emph{assuming known mixing
filters}. We propose to perform the speech separation and enhancement task in
the short-time Fourier transform domain, using the convolutive transfer
function (CTF) approximation. Compared to time-domain filters, CTF has much
less taps, consequently it has less near-common zeros among channels and less
computational complexity. The work proposes three speech-source recovery
methods, namely: i) the multichannel inverse filtering method, i.e. the
multiple input/output inverse theorem (MINT), is exploited in the CTF domain,
and for the multi-source case, ii) a beamforming-like multichannel inverse
filtering method applying single source MINT and using power minimization,
which is suitable whenever the source CTFs are not all known, and iii) a
constrained Lasso method, where the sources are recovered by minimizing the
-norm to impose their spectral sparsity, with the constraint that the
-norm fitting cost, between the microphone signals and the mixing model
involving the unknown source signals, is less than a tolerance. The noise can
be reduced by setting a tolerance onto the noise power. Experiments under
various acoustic conditions are carried out to evaluate the three proposed
methods. The comparison between them as well as with the baseline methods is
presented.Comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language
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