TY - GEN
T1 - Study of a generalized spherical array beamformer with adjustable binaural reproduction
AU - Jeffet, Michael
AU - Rafaely, Boaz
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - Microphone array processing and beamforming methods are widely used to enhance speech signals in noisy and reverberant environments. Recently, a generalized spherical array beamformer (GSB) was introduced incorporating beamforming with binaural sound reproduction. This GSB improves both the spatial realism and the speech intelligibility in the reproduced acoustic scene. In this paper the limitations and the trade-offs that result from incorporating both beamforming and binaural reproduction in a single array are investigated both theoretically and experimentally. Results show a clear trade-off between binaural reproduction and spatial selectivity performance, such that improving one is only possible at the expense of the other. These results lead to the proposal of the design of an adjustable generalized beamformer, which is suggested as a future research direction with the aim of enabling the GSB to adapt to changing environments.
AB - Microphone array processing and beamforming methods are widely used to enhance speech signals in noisy and reverberant environments. Recently, a generalized spherical array beamformer (GSB) was introduced incorporating beamforming with binaural sound reproduction. This GSB improves both the spatial realism and the speech intelligibility in the reproduced acoustic scene. In this paper the limitations and the trade-offs that result from incorporating both beamforming and binaural reproduction in a single array are investigated both theoretically and experimentally. Results show a clear trade-off between binaural reproduction and spatial selectivity performance, such that improving one is only possible at the expense of the other. These results lead to the proposal of the design of an adjustable generalized beamformer, which is suggested as a future research direction with the aim of enabling the GSB to adapt to changing environments.
KW - Array processing
KW - beamforming
KW - binaural sound reproduction
KW - spatial release from masking
KW - speech intelligibility
KW - spherical harmonics
KW - spherical microphone arrays
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84904480234
U2 - 10.1109/HSCMA.2014.6843255
DO - 10.1109/HSCMA.2014.6843255
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781479931095
T3 - 2014 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays, HSCMA 2014
SP - 77
EP - 81
BT - 2014 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays, HSCMA 2014
T2 - 2014 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays, HSCMA 2014
Y2 - 12 May 2014 through 14 May 2014
ER -