The mvdr beamformer for speech enhancement

Emanuël A.P. Habets, Jacob Benesty, Sharon Gannot, Israel Cohen

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    41 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    The minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer is widely studied in the area of speech enhancement and can be used for both speech dereverberation and noise reduction. This chapter summarizes some new insights into the MVDR beamformer. Specifically, the local and global behaviors of the MVDR beamformer are analyzed, different forms of the MVDR beamformer and relations between the MVDR and other optimal beamformers are discussed. In addition, the tradeoff between dereverberation and noise reduction is analyzed. This analysis is done for a mixture of coherent and non-coherent noise fields and entirely non-coherent noise fields. It is shown that maximum noise reduction is achieved when the MVDR beamformer is used for noise reduction only. The amount of noise reduction that is sacrificed when complete dereverberation is required depends on the directto- reverberation ratio of the acoustic impulse response between the source and the reference microphone. The performance evaluation demonstrates the tradeoff between dereverberation and noise reduction.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationSpringer Topics in Signal Processing
    PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media B.V.
    Pages225-254
    Number of pages30
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2010

    Publication series

    NameSpringer Topics in Signal Processing
    Volume3
    ISSN (Print)1866-2609
    ISSN (Electronic)1866-2617

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2010.

    Funding

    1 This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation under Grant 1085/05.

    FundersFunder number
    Israel Science Foundation1085/05

      Keywords

      • Microphone Array
      • Noise Reduction
      • Power Spectral Density
      • Reverberation Time
      • Speech Enhancement

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