PHASE TIME-FREQUENCY MASKING BASED SPEECH ENHANCEMENT ALGORITHM USING CIRCULAR MICROPHONE ARRAY

A novel time-frequency masking approach for circular microphone array speech enhancement in the presence of competing interference and background noise is proposed in this paper. Multichannel speech enhancement systems can often be constructed by a concatenation of a beamformer and a single-channel postfilter, which rely on accurate estimation of steering vector and the residual interference plus noise power spectrum density (PSD), respectively. However, the performance of existing multiple microphone speech enhancement algorithm will degrade in the presence of competing interference. The proposed phase-based time-frequency masking approach can improve the estimation of the steering vector and residual interference plus noise PSD in the presence of competing interference and background noise. The experimental analysis verifies the advantages achieved by the proposed method, in comparison with the state-of-the-art multiple microphone speech enhancement methods.