Enhancement of Sound Sources Located within a Particular Area Using a Pair of Small Microphone Arrays

A method for extracting a sound signal from a particular area that is surrounded by multiple ambient noise sources is proposed. This method performs several fixed beamformings on a pair of small microphone arrays separated from each other to estimate the signal and noise power spectra. Noise suppression is achieved by applying spectrum emphasis to the output of fixed beamforming in the frequency domain, which is derived from the estimated power spectra. In experiments performed in a room with reverberation, this method succeeded in suppressing the ambient noise, giving an SNR improvement of more than 10 dB, which is better than the performance of the conventional fixed and adaptive beamforming methods using a large-aperture microphone array. We also confirmed that this method keeps its performance even if the noise source location changes continuously or abruptly.