Evaluation of Blind Source Separation for different algorithms based on second order statistics and different spatial configurations of directional microphones

The present study is concerned with the convolutive Blind Source Separation (BSS) of sound sources that leads to a significant speech intelligibility enhancement. Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment two different algorithms of convolutive BSS were compared. Both methods are based on second order statistics since such approach is simple and gives satisfactory performance. The data resulted from this experiment suggested that with different approaches, different speech intelligibility improvement could be obtained. In the second experiment the influence of the spatial configuration of the cardioid microphones on the BSS performance was measured. It was revealed that the best separation for a considered spatial configuration can be obtained when microphones are directed alternately.