Speakers Determination and Isolation from Multispeaker Speech Signal

In this letter, we address the issue of determining the number of speakers from multispeaker speech signals collected simultaneously using a pair of spatially separated microphones. The spatial separation of the microphones results in time delay of arrival of speech signals from a given speaker. The differences in the time delays for different speakers are exploited to determine the number of speakers from the multi speaker signals. The key idea is that for a given speaker, the relative spacing’s of the instants of significant excitation of the vocal tract system remain unchanged in the direct components of the speech signals at the two microphones. The time delays can be estimated from the cross-correlation of the Hilbert envelopes of the linear prediction residuals of the multi speaker signals collected at the two microphones. Keywords— Excitation Source, Hilbert Envelope, Linear Prediction Residual, Multispeaker speech signal, time-delay estimation