Microphone array post-filtering for non-stationary noise suppression

Microphone array post-filtering allows additional reduction of noise components at a beamformer output. Existing techniques are either restricted to classical delay-and-sum beamformers, or are based on single-channel speech enhancement algorithms that are inefficient at attenuating highly non-stationary noise components. In this paper, we introduce a microphone array post-filtering approach, applicable to adaptive beamformer, that differentiates non-stationary noise components from speech components. The ratio between the transient power at the beamformer primary output and the transient power at the reference noise signals is used for indicating whether such a transient is desired or interfering. Based on a Gaussian statistical model and combined with an appropriate spectral enhancement technique, a significantly reduced level of non-stationary noise is achieved without further distorting speech components. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.