Drift-Compensated Adaptive Filtering to improve speech intelligibility in presence of asynchronous interference

Conventional adaptive interference cancellation schemes can hardly improve speech intelligibility in the presence of interference whose source cannot be obtained synchronously with the corrupted target speech, because there are inevitable timing drifts between the two inputs to the system. To address this problem, we propose a novel drift-compensated adaptive filtering (DCAF) scheme in this paper. It extends the conventional schemes by adopting a timing drift tracking and compensation mechanism which, together with an advanced adaptation algorithm, makes it possible to reduce the interference even if the magnitude of the timing drift rate is as big as one or two percent. This range is large enough to cover timing accuracy variations of most audio recording and playing devices nowadays.