Acoustic vector sensor based reverberant speech separation with probabilistic time-frequency masking

Most existing speech source separation algorithms have been developed for separating sound mixtures acquired by using a conventional microphone array. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the problem of source separation using an acoustic vector sensor (AVS). We propose a new method for the separation of convolutive mixtures by incorporating the intensity vector of the acoustic field, obtained using spatially co-located microphones which carry the direction of arrival (DOA) information. The DOA cues from the intensity vector, together with the frequency bin-wise mixing vector cues, are then used to determine the probability of each time-frequency (T-F) point of the mixture being dominated by a specific source, based on the Gaussian mixture models (GMM), whose parameters are evaluated and refined iteratively using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Finally, the probability is used to derive the T-F masks for recovering the sources. The proposed method is evaluated in simulated reverberant environments in terms of signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR), giving an average improvement of approximately 1:5 dB as compared with a related T-F mask approach based on a conventional microphone setting.