Two-Microphone Noise Reduction Using Spatial Information-Based Spectral Amplitude Estimation

Traditional two-microphone noise reduction algorithms to deal with highly nonstationary directional noises generally use the direction of arrival or phase difference information. The performance of these algorithms deteriorate when diffuse noises coexist with nonstationary directional noises in realistic adverse environments. In this paper, we present a two-channel noise reduction algorithm using a spatial information-based speech estimator and a spatial-information-controlled soft-decision noise estimator to improve the noise reduction performance in realistic nonstationary noisy environments. A target presence probability estimator based on Bayes rules using both phase difference and magnitude squared coherence is proposed for soft-decision of noise estimation, so that they can share complementary advantages when both directional noises and diffuse noises are present. Performances of the proposed two-microphone noise reduction algorithm are evaluated by noise reduction, log-spectral distance (LSD) and word recognition rate (WRR) of a distant-talking ASR system in a real room’s noisy environment. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better noises suppression without further distorting the desired signal components over the comparative dual-channel noise reduction algorithms. key words: microphone array, phase difference, magnitude squared coherence, spectral amplitude estimator