Blind Speech Separation in Presence of Correlated Noise with Generalized Eigenvector Beamforming

This paper considers the convolutive blind source separation of speech sources in the presence of spatially correlated noise. We introduce a method for estimating the scaled mixing matrix from the sources to the microphones even if coherent noise is present. This is achieved by combining time-frequency sparseness with the generalized eigenvalue decomposition of the power spectral density matrix (PSD) of the noisy speech and noise-only microphone signals. Separation is performed by spatial filtering with coefficients constructed by Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization which places spatial nulls at the interferer{^A}?`s direction. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of separating 2 sources in a reverberant environment (RT60=0ms..500ms) degraded by significant directional noise.