Nonlinear speech enhancement by virtual increase of channels and maximum SNR beamformer

In this paper, we propose a new microphone array signal processing technique, which increases the number of microphones virtually by generating extra signal channels from real microphone signals. Microphone array signal processing methods such as speech enhancement are effective for improving the quality of various speech applications such as speech recognition and voice communication systems. However, the performance of speech enhancement and other signal processing methods depends on the number of microphones. Thus, special equipment such as a multichannel A/D converter or a microphone array is needed to achieve high processing performance. Therefore, our aim was to establish a technique for improving the performance of array signal processing with a small number of microphones and, in particular, to increase the number of channels virtually by synthesizing virtual microphone signals, or extra signal channels, from two channels of microphone signals. Each virtual microphone signal is generated by interpolating a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) representation of the microphone signals. The phase and amplitude of the signal are interpolated individually. The phase is linearly interpolated on the basis of a sound propagation model, and the amplitude is nonlinearly interpolated on the basis of β divergence. We also performed speech enhancement experiments using a maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) beamformer equipped with virtual microphones and evaluated the improvement in performance upon introducing virtual microphones.