Interference-Controlled Maximum Noise Reduction Beamformer Based on Deep-Learned Interference Manifold

Beamforming has been used in a wide range of applications to extract the signal of interest from microphone array observations, which consist of not only the signal of interest, but also noise, interference, and reverberation. The recently proposed interference-controlled maximum noise reduction (ICMR) beamformer provides a flexible way to control the specified amount of the interference attenuation and noise suppression; but it requires accurate estimation of the manifold vector of the interference sources, which is challenging to achieve in real-world applications. To address this issue, we introduce an interference-controlled maximum noise reduction network (ICMRNet) in this study, which is a deep neural network (DNN)-based method for manifold vector estimation. With densely connected modified conformer blocks and the end-to-end training strategy, the interference manifold is learned directly from the observation signals. This approach, akin to ICMR, adeptly adapts to time-varying interference and demonstrates superior convergence rate and extraction efficacy as compared to the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV)-based neural beamformers when appropriate attenuation factors are selected. Moreover, via learning-based extraction, ICMRNet effectively suppresses reverberation components within the target signal. Comparative analysis against baseline methods validates the efficacy of the proposed method.