GSVD-based optimal filtering for single and multimicrophone speech enhancement

In this paper, a generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) based algorithm is proposed for enhancing multimicrophone speech signals degraded by additive colored noise. This GSVD-based multimicrophone algorithm can be considered to be an extension of the single-microphone signal subspace algorithms for enhancing noisy speech signals and amounts to a specific optimal filtering problem when the desired response signal cannot be observed. The optimal filter can be written as a function of the generalized singular vectors and singular values of a speech and noise data matrix. A number of symmetry properties are derived for the single-microphone and multimicrophone optimal filter, which are valid for the white noise case as well as for the colored noise case. In addition, the averaging step of some single-microphone signal subspace algorithms is examined, leading to the conclusion that this averaging operation is unnecessary and even suboptimal. For simple situations, where we consider localized sources and no multipath propagation, the GSVD-based optimal filtering technique exhibits the spatial directivity pattern of a beamformer. When comparing the noise reduction performance for realistic situations, simulations show that the GSVD-based optimal filtering technique has a better performance than standard fixed and adaptive beamforming techniques for all reverberation times and that it is more robust to deviations from the nominal situation, as, e.g., encountered in uncalibrated microphone arrays.