Blind source separation combining independent component analysis and beamforming

  • Authors:

  • Hiroshi Saruwatari;Satoshi Kurita;Kazuya Takeda;Fumitada Itakura;Tsuyoki Nishikawa;Kiyohiro Shikano

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara, Japan;Center for Integrated Acoustic Information Research (CIAIR), Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan;Center for Integrated Acoustic Information Research (CIAIR), Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan;Center for Integrated Acoustic Information Research (CIAIR), Nagoya University/CIAIR, Nagoya, Japan;Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara, Japan;Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara, Japan

  • Venue:
  • EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We describe a new method of blind source separation (BSS) on a microphone array combining subband independent component analysis (ICA) and beamforming. The proposed array system consists of the following three sections: (1) subband ICA-based BSS section with estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) of the sound source, (2) null beamforming section based on the estimated DOA, and (3) integration of (1) and (2) based on the algorithm diversity. Using this technique, we can resolve the low-convergence problem through optimization in ICA. To evaluate its effectiveness, signal-separation and speech-recognition experiments are performed under various reverberant conditions. The results of the signal-separation experiments reveal that the noise reduction rate (NRR) of about 18dB is obtained under the nonreverberant condition, and NRRs of 8dB and 6dB are obtained in the case that the reverberation times are 150 milliseconds and 300 milliseconds. These performances are superior to those of both simple ICA-based BSS and simple beamforming method. Also, fromthe speech-recognition experiments, it is evident that the performance of the proposed method in terms of the word recognition rates is superior to those of the conventional ICA-based BSS method under all reverberant conditions.