Multichannel direction-independent speech enhancement using spectral amplitude estimation (Q1418323)

Summary: This paper introduces two short-time spectral amplitude estimators for speech enhancement with multiple microphones. Based on joint Gaussian models of speech and noise Fourier coefficients, the clean speech amplitudes are estimated with respect to the MMSE or the MAP criterion. The estimators outperform single microphone minimum mean square amplitude estimators when the speech components are highly correlated and the noise components are sufficiently uncorrelated. Whereas the first MMSE estimator also requires knowledge of the direction of arrival, the second MAP estimator performs a direction-independent noise reduction. The estimators are generalizations of the well-known single channel MMSE estimator derived by \textit{Y. Ephraim} and \textit{D. Malah} [Speech enhancement using a minimum mean-square error short-time spectral amplitude estimator, IEEE Trans. Acoustics, Speech, Signal Process. 32, No. 6, 1109--1121 (1984)] and the MAP estimator derived by \textit{P. Wolfe} and \textit{S. Godsill} [Simple alternatives to the Ephraim and Malah suppression rule for speech enhancement, in Proc. 11th IEEE Workshop Stat. Signal Process. (SSP '01), 496--499 (2001)], respectively.