Cancelling convolutive and additive coloured noises for speech enhancement

In the framework of speech enhancement, many approaches have been developed when the speech signal is only corrupted by additive noise. However, in an auditorium, when echoes appear, spatial transformations between the sources and the microphones must be considered. For this reason, we propose to deal with speech contaminated by both convolutive and additive coloured noise. The two-microphone based noise canceller we present operates as follows: firstly, a prewhitening step is carried out. Secondly, the blind deconvolution method we use makes it possible to estimate the finite impulse responses (FIR), their orders and the variances of the additive noise, which is a great advantage. Then, the filtered versions of speech, estimated by means of a subspace method, are used to retrieve the original speech.