Noise Reduction in the Spherical Harmonic Domain Using a Tradeoff Beamformer and Narrowband DOA Estimates

In noise reduction, a common approach is to use a microphone array with a beamformer that combines the individual microphone signals to extract a desired speech signal. The beamformer weights usually depend on the statistics of the noise and desired speech signals, which cannot be directly observed and must be estimated. Estimators based on the speech presence probability (SPP) seek to update the statistics estimates only when desired speech is known to be absent or present. However, they do not normally distinguish between desired and undesired speech sources. In this contribution, an algorithm is proposed to distinguish between these two types of sources using additional spatial information, by estimating a desired speech presence probability based on the combination of a multichannel SPP and a direction of arrival (DOA) based probability. The DOA-based probability is computed using DOA estimates for each time-frequency bin. The estimated statistics are then used to compute the weights of a spherical harmonic domain tradeoff beamformer, which achieves a balance between noise reduction and speech distortion. The performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach at suppressing both background noise and spatially coherent noise. A number of audio examples and sample spectrograms are also provided.