Implicit control of noise canceller for speech enhancement

Widrow’s interference canceller, adapted by the normalized LMS (NLMS), is a standard approach for separating signals from multiple speakers, for example from the driver (target) and the codriver (interferer) in a car. In practice, the adaptation must be carried out only when the interferer is dominant, i.e. only when some estimate of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is below a certain threshold. In this paper, we present the Implicitely controlled LMS (ILMS), a modification of the NLMS. ILMS adaptation is performed continuously using a variable step-size, whose design implicitly detects dominance of the interferer over target activity. Specific measures are taken to guarantee the stability during adaptation. Theoretical analysis of the ILMS transient convergence and stability conditions prove significant improvement with respect to the original NLMS. Experimental results on real in-car data assess the predicted behavior.