Real-time Audio Source Separation by Delay and Attenuation Compensation in the Time Domain

There is increased interest in using microphone arrays in a variety of audio source separation and consequently speech processing applications. In particular, small arrays of two to four microphones are presently under focus in the research literature, especially with regard to real-time source separation and speech enhancement capability. In this paper we focus on a real-time implementation of the delay and attenuation compensation (DAC) algorithm. Although the algorithm is designed for anechoic environments, its complexity and performance on real data represent a basis for designing more complex approaches to deal with reverberant environments. We highlight real-time issues and analyze the algorithm’s real-time performance on a database of more than 1500 mixtures of real voice recordings ranging from an anechoic to a strongly echoic office with reverberation time of 500 msec.