Due to the ambient noise, interferences, reverberation, and the speakers moving and talking concurrently, it is a challenge to extract a target speech in a real cocktail-party environment. Emulating human auditory systems, this paper proposes a two-stage target speech extraction method which combines fixed beamforming and blind source separation. With the target speaker remaining in the vicinity of a fixed location, several beams from a microphone array point at an area containing the target, then the beamformed output is fed to a blind source separation scheme to get the target signal. The fixed beamforming preprocessing enhances the robustness to time-varying environments and makes the target signal dominant in the beamformed output and hence easier to extract. In addition, the proposed method does not need to know the knowledge of source positions. Simulations have verified the the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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