An informed LCMV filter based on multiple instantaneous direction-of-arrival estimates

Abstract

Extracting sound sources in noisy and reverberant conditions remains a challenging task that is commonly found in modern communication systems. In this work, we consider the problem of obtaining a desired spatial response for at most L simultaneously active sound sources. The proposed spatial filter is obtained by minimizing the diffuse plus self-noise power at the output of the filter subject to L linear constraints. In contrast to earlier works, the L constraints are based on instantaneous narrowband direction-of-arrival estimates. In addition, a novel estimator for the diffuse-to-noise ratio is developed that exhibits a sufficiently high temporal and spectral resolution to achieve both dereverberation and noise reduction. The presented results demonstrate that an optimal tradeoff between maximum white noise gain and maximum directivity is achieved.