An Effective Method for Enhancing Robustness of Generalized Sidelobe Canceller Beamformer in Noisy Recording Scenario

High level of noise, interference or non-directional noise source degrade the perceptual quality, speech intelligibility of received speech. Consequently, improving the recording speech signal is a crucial pre-processing in several applications, such as cochlear implants, smart - home, mobile phone, teleconference system, hearing aids, voice - controlled equipment. Microphone array (MA) technology is typically placed at a distance from a target speaker to capture the original speech component and requires removing background noise, interference or competing talkers. MA beamforming provides high diversity toward the sound source, saving the clean speech data and eliminating background noise. Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (GSC) beamformer is commonly integrated into numerous acoustic applications due to its effective performance in almost all recording scenarios. Because of the moving head of talker during conversation, the difference of microphone quality, the error of estimated steering vector, the microphone mismatches, the displacement of MA, the inaccurate sampling rate, GSC beamformer’s evaluation often decreased. In this contribution, the authors proposed an effective way of controlling the steering vector to improve beamforming’s performance. The obtained results has proven the advantage of the author’s proposed method in improving the robustness of GSC beamformer in complex and adverse recording environments.