Speech enhancement based on a combined multi-channel array with constrained iterative and auditory masked processing

While a number of studies have investigated various speech enhancement and noise suppression schemes, most consider either a single channel or array processing framework. Clearly there are potential advantages in leveraging the strengths of array processing solutions in suppressing noise from a direction other than the speaker, with that seen in single channel methods that include speech spectral constraints or psychoacoustically motivated processing. In this paper, we propose to integrate a combined fixed/adaptive beamforming algorithm (CFA-BF) for speech enhancement with two single channel methods based on speech spectral constrained iterative processing (Auto-LSP), and an auditory masked threshold based method using equivalent rectangular bandwidth filtering (GMMSE-AMTERB). After formulating the method, we evaluate performance on a subset of the TIMIT corpus with four real noise sources. We demonstrate a consistent level of noise suppression and voice communication quality improvement using the proposed method as reflected by an overall average 26dB increase in SegSNR from the original degraded audio corpus.