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research article

Beamforming with a Maximum Negentropy Criterion

Kumatani, Kenichi
•
McDonough, John
•
Rauch, Barbara
Show more
2009
IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing

In this paper, we address a beamforming application based on the capture of far-field speech data from a single speaker in a real meeting room. After the position of the speaker is estimated by a speaker tracking system, we construct a subband-domain beamformer in generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) configuration. In contrast to conventional practice, we then optimize the active weight vectors of the GSC so as to obtain an output signal with maximum negentropy (MN). This implies the beamformer output should be as non-Gaussian as possible. For calculating negentropy, we consider the Γ and the generalized Gaussian (GG) pdfs. After MN beamforming, Zelinski post- filtering is performed to further enhance the speech by remov- ing residual noise. Our beamforming algorithm can suppress noise and reverberation without the signal cancellation problems encountered in the conventional beamforming algorithms. We demonstrate this fact through a set of acoustic simulations. More- over, we show the effectiveness of our proposed technique through a series of far-field automatic speech recognition experiments on the Multi-Channel Wall Street Journal Audio Visual Corpus (MC- WSJ-AV), a corpus of data captured with real far-field sensors, in a realistic acoustic environment, and spoken by real speakers. On the MC-WSJ-AV evaluation data, the delay-and-sum beamformer with post-filtering achieved a word error rate (WER) of 16.5%. MN beamforming with the Γ pdf achieved a 15.8% WER, which was further reduced to 13.2% with the GG pdf, whereas the simple delay-and-sum beamformer provided a WER of 17.8%. To the best of our knowledge, no lower error rates at present have been reported in the literature on this ASR task.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TASL.2009.2015090
Web of Science ID

WOS:000267434300015

Author(s)
Kumatani, Kenichi
McDonough, John
Rauch, Barbara
Klakow, Dietrich
Garner, Philip N.
Li, Weifeng  
Date Issued

2009

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing
Volume

17

Issue

5

Start page

994

End page

1008

Subjects

Microphone arrays

•

beamforming

•

speech recognition

•

speech enhancement

•

source separation

•

Square Error Estimation

•

Hidden Markov-Models

•

Speech Enhancement

•

Microphone Arrays

•

Source Separation

•

Blocking Matrix

•

Noise-Reduction

•

Filter

•

Recognition

•

Cancellation

URL

URL

http://publications.idiap.ch/downloads/papers/2008/Kumatani_ASLP_2009.pdf

Related documents

http://publications.idiap.ch/index.php/publications/showcite/kumatani:rr08-29
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIDIAP  
Available on Infoscience
February 11, 2010
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/46884
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