Combining Superdirective Beamforming and Frequency-Domain Blind Source Separation for Highly Reverberant Signals

Frequency-domain blind source separation (BSS) performs poorly in high reverberation because the independence assumption collapses at each frequency bins when the number of bins increases. To improve the separation result, this paper proposes a method which combines two techniques by using beamforming as a preprocessor of blind source separation. With the sound source locations supposed to be known, the mixed signals are dereverberated and enhanced by beamforming; then the beamformed signals are further separated by blind source separation. To implement the proposed method, a superdirective fixed beamformer is designed for beamforming, and an interfrequency dependence-based permutation alignment scheme is presented for frequency-domain blind source separation. With beamforming shortening mixing filters and reducing noise before blind source separation, the combined method works better in reverberation. The performance of the proposed method is investigated by separating up to 4 sources in different environments with reverberation time from 100 ms to 700 ms. Simulation results verify the outperformance of the proposed method over using beamforming or blind source separation alone. Analysis demonstrates that the proposed method is computationally efficient and appropriate for real-time processing.