A Multichannel Kalman-Based Wiener Filter Approach For Speaker Interference Reduction In Meetings

Recording a meeting and obtaining clean speech signals of each speaker is a challenging task. Even with a multichannel recording, in which all speakers are equipped with a close-talk microphone, speech of an active speaker still couples not only into his dedicated microphone, but also into all other microphone channels at a certain level. This is denoted as crosstalk and requires a multichannel speaker interference reduction to enhance the microphone channels for further processing. To solve this issue, we use a Wiener filter which is based on all individual microphone channels. We extend an existing approach by integrating methods from acoustic echo cancellation to improve the estimation of the interferer (noise) components of the filter, which leads to an improved signal-to-interferer ratio by up to 2.1 dB absolute at constant speech component quality.