Integrated adaptive beamforming and Wiener filtering for a robust microphone array

Speech is dramatically degraded when a distant microphone is used in real environments. One of the possible solutions is to use a microphone array to improve the quality of the recorded speech signal. In this paper we present a robust beamformer that integrates the directional noise reduction capability of a modification of the generalized sidelobe canceller with adaptive blocking matrix and the great performance of the Wiener postfiltering techniques against low-correlated noises. Experimental results show that the proposed integrated adaptive Wiener-filtering beamformer is at least as robust to directional and uncorrelated noise as conventional postfiltering of the output and presents a lower level of degradation of the speech signal.