A weighted multichannel Wiener filter for multiple sources scenarios

Abstract

The scenario of P speakers received by an M microphone array in a reverberant enclosure is considered. We extend the single source speech distortion weighted multichannel Wiener filter (SDW-MWF) to deal with multiple speakers. The mean squared error (MSE) is extended by introducing P weights, each controlling the distortion of one of the sources. The P weights enable further control in the design of the beamformer (BF). Two special cases of the proposed BF are the SDW-MWF and the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV)-BF. We provide a theoretical analysis for the performance of the proposed BF. Finally, we exemplify the ability of the proposed method to control the tradeoff between noise reduction (NR) and distortion levels of various speakers in an experimental study.