Blind source separation in a distributed microphone meeting environment for improved teleconferencing

From an audio perspective, the present state of teleconferencing technology leaves something to be desired; speaker overlap is one of the causes of this inadequate performance. To that end, this paper presents a frequency-domain implementation of convolutive BSS specifically designed for the nature of the teleconferencing environment. In addition to presenting a novel depermutation scheme, this paper presents a least-squares post-processing scheme, which exploits segments during which only a subset of all speakers are active. Experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate the ability of the proposed methods to provide SIRs at or near that of the adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) solution which is obtained under idealistic assumptions that the ANC filters are adapted with one source being on at a time.