Blind Speech Extraction Combining ICA-based Noise Estimation and Less-Musical-Noise Nonlinear Post Processing

44th ASILOMAR Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers , November 7-10, 2010, California, USA.In this paper, we propose a new blind speech extraction microphone array combining an independent component analysis (ICA)-based noise estimator and nonlinear signal processing for achieving high-quality speech enhancement. The proposed method consists of three parts, namely, the ICA-based noise estimator for a robust target cancellation, channel-wise spectral subtraction (chSS), and post-beamforming to sum up the chSS outputs. We provide a detailed proof of the less musical noise generation property in the proposed method via higher-order statistics analysis, compared with the conventional multichannel speech enhancement methods. The superiority of the proposed method is assessed in the experimental subjective evaluation