Effectiveness of directional microphones and utilization of source arriving directions in source separation

In this paper, we present the effectiveness of directional microphones in source separation and present a three-source separation method in which microphones are directed toward source directions obtained by image processing. The separation performance with directional microphones is much higher than that with omni-directional microphones. In the proposed method for more than two sources, we direct microphones toward sources estimated by flesh color extraction for source separation. The method estimates a convergence point of separating parameters based on source directions. We show that using the estimated convergence point as an initial value considerably improves convergence performance and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in three source-separation in a reverberant environment.