Real Time Implementation of a Blind Beamformer for Subband Speech Enhancement Using Kurtosis Maximization

This paper presents a real time implementation of a blind beamformer for subband speech enhancement. The beamformer adaptively maximizes the statistical kurtosis measure of the beamformer’s output signal. Speech carries high kurtosis and noise often exhibit lower kurtosis. Hence, maximization of the output signal’s kurtosis enhances speech, in general. The implementation is carried out on a novel framework for real time audio processing in MATLAB and uses low latency ASIO sound cards. The implementation is evaluated using recorded signals and the speech is enhanced approximately 10 dB by the proposed approach with perceptually low speech distortion.