Structural analysis of multisensor arrays for speech separation applications

摘要

This paper analyzes the beamforming separation effectiveness of several different microphone array configurations. These configurations consist of 4, 8, and 16 microphones placed in a plane for two-dimensional speech separation, with inter-microphone distances varying from 10cm to 160cm in logarithmic step sizes. It is discovered that the linear and bilinear arrays result in the largest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain after delay-and-sum beamforming in the case of speech signal and speech noise. Also, simulations show that larger inter-microphone distances result in a higher SNR gain, although the practicality of the higher inter-microphone distances is limited for certain applications where the array size is constrained.