Speech enhancement via separation of sources from co-located microphone recordings

This paper investigates multichannel speech enhancement for colocated microphone recordings based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Comparisons are made between co-located microphone arrays that contain microphones with mixed polar responses with traditional uniform linear arrays formed from omni-directional microphones. It is shown that polar responses of the microphones are a key factor in the performance of ICA applied to co-located microphones. Results from PESQ testing show a significant improvement in speech quality of ICA separated sources as a result of using an AVS rather than other types of microphone arrays.