MULTICHANNEL SPEECH SEPARATION BY EIGENDECOMPOSITION AND ITS APPLICATION TO CO-TALKER INTERFERENCE REMOVAL

This paper describes the concept of eigendecomposition for multichanne l signal separation, an alternative method of enhancing the desired si gnal corrupted by interference, The method uses two observations that come from a pair of sensors, both of which contain the desired signal and the undesired signal(s), The method assumes that the desired signa l and the undesired signal(s) are uncorrelated, and the signal-to-nois e ratios (SNR's) of each observation are different and not necessarily greater than unity, The technique has been successfully used to separ ate speech signals corrupted heavily by ambient noise, co talker inter ference, and other sources such as background music, The method can al so be applied to instances where more than two sensors are used by fir st forming two beams and then processing the output of the two beamfor mers.