Car speech enhancement using a microphone array

Abstract

This paper proposes a speech enhancement approach to suppress the interference of car noise. A linear microphone array is adopted for far-talking speech acquisition and delay-and-sum beamforming noise reduction. We present an effective time delay estimator using the coherence function between the reference microphone and the beamformed speech. To further enhance the beamformed speech, we exploit an improved Wiener filter where the resulting noise correlation in microphone array is relatively small so that the performance of optimal Wiener filtering could be achieved. Also, due to the serious degradation in low frequency car speech, we develop a spectral weighting function to compensate the low frequency filtering. These two processing units serve as the post filters to attain the desirable enhancement performance. In the experiments on microphone array speech in presence of real and simulated car noises, we find that the proposed algorithm performs well. Performance is measured in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio and the word error rate. The combined delay-and-sum beamformer and two post filters obtain the best results compared to other methods. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.