Multiple Speaker Separation from Noisy Sources in Reverberant Rooms using Relative Transfer Matrix

Abstract

Separation of simultaneously active multiple speakers is a difficult task in environments with strong reverberation and many background noise sources. This paper uses the relative transfer matrix (ReTM), a generalization of the relative transfer function of a room, to propose a simple yet novel approach for separating concurrent speakers using noisy multichannel microphone recordings. The proposed method (i) allows multiple speech and background noise sources, (ii) includes reverberation, (iii) does not need the knowledge of the locations of speech and noise sources nor microphone locations and their relative geometry, and (iv) uses relatively small segment of recordings for training. We illustrate the speech source separation capability with improved intelligibility using a simulation study consisting of four speakers in the presence of three noise sources in a reverberant room. We also show the applicability of the method in a practical experiment in a real room.