Speech Enhancement Based on Blind Source Separation in Car Environments

This paper describes a new speech enhancement system used in car environments, where independent component analysis (ICA)-based blind source separation (BSS) and subband elimination (SBE) processing are combined to achieve a high separation performance. The proposed method consists of two parts, fast-convergence frequency domain ICA and SBE processing based on the independence among the separated subband signals. The SBE enforcedly eliminates the subband components in which the separation could not be performed well. The experiment in a real car environment reveals that the proposed method can improve the qualities of the separated speech and word recognition rates for both directional and diffuse noises.