Online Maximization of Subband Kurtosis for Blind Adaptive Beamforming in Realtime Speech Extraction

This paper presents a method for blind beamforming with application in realtime speech extraction in a non-stationary environment. The blind beamforming is carried out using an online kurtosis maximization approach where the optimization is based on Newton´s method. The main novelty of the paper lies in the formulation of the subband kurtosis approximation, where a locally quadratic criterion is solved at each iteration. Further, a real-time digital signal processor (DSP) implementation of the method is conducted and results with real data is presented.