A comparison between alternative beamforming strategies for interference cancelation in noisy and reverberant environment

In speech communication systems the received microphone signals are often degraded by competing speakers, noise signals and room reverberation. Microphone arrays are commonly utilized to enhance the desired speech signal. In this paper two important design criteria, namely the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) and the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformers, are explored. These structures differ in their treatment of the interference sources. Experimental results using simulated reverberant enclosure are used for comparing the two strategies. It is shown that the LCMV beamformer outperforms the MVDR beamformer provided that the acoustic environment is time-invariant.