A multichannel speech enhancement method for functional MRI systems using a distributed microphone array

Multichannel speech enhancement has been shown to be an effective method to decrease speech distortion introduced during speech enhancement, especially in environments like MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) which have a distributed noise source. However, these methods suffer from high computational complexity which makes them almost impractical. The use of subband filtering has been suggested to reduce this complexity but the performance of the existing subband methods deteriorate as the number of subbands increases. In this paper we introduce a new multichannel speech enhancement algorithm based on subband adaptive filtering that works for higher number of subbands at a lower complexity. The real-world experiments demonstrate the performance of the new scheme in an MRI room.