Spatio-temporal audio enhancement based on IAA noise covariance matrix estimates

A method for estimating the noise covariance matrix in a multichannel setup is proposed. The method is based on the iterative adaptive approach (IAA), which only needs short segments of data to estimate the covariance matrix. Therefore, the method can be used for fast varying signals. The method is based on an assumption of the desired signal being harmonic, which is used for estimating the noise covariance matrix from the covariance matrix of the observed signal. The noise covariance estimate is used in the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) filter and compared to an amplitude and phase estimation (APES) based filter. For a fixed number of samples, the performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio can be increased by using the IAA method, whereas if the filter size is fixed and the number of samples in the APES based filter is increased, the APES based filter performs better.