Evaluation of blind signal separation method using directivity pattern under reverberant conditions

This paper describes a new blind signal separation method using the directivity patterns of a microphone array. In this method, to deal with the arriving lags among each microphone, the inverses of the mixing matrices are calculated in the frequency domain so that the separated signals are mutually independent. Since the calculations are carried out in each frequency independently, the following problems arise: (1) permutation of each sound source, (2) arbitrariness of each source gain. In this paper, we propose a new solution that directivity patterns are explicitly used to estimate each sound source direction. As the results of signal separation experiments, it is shown that the proposed method improves the SNR of degraded speech by about 16 dB under non-reverberant condition. Also, the proposed method improves the SNR by 8.7 dB when the reverberation time is 184 ms, and by 5.1 dB when the reverberation time is 322 ms