A reverberation robust target speech detection method using dual-microphone in distant-talking scene

Speech signal processing with coherent interference in reverberant environment under distant-talking scene has always been a difficult problem, in which Target Speech Detection (TSD) plays a basic role. This paper proposes a reverberation robust TSD method, which is based on Beam-to-Reference Ratio (BRR) using a dual-microphone array, is proposed. At first, detection thresholds in Time-Frequency (T-F) domain are derived under free sound field assumption. A novel estimator, Direct-to-Reverberate Ratio (DRR), is introduced to enlarge the basic assumption to reverberant environment which is common in distant-talking scene. Then T-F thresholds of BRR are revised according to DRR. Meanwhile, innate weak point of compact array is studied due to spatial aliasing and a sidelobe suppression procedure is proposed to further eliminate the effect of the coherent interference. According to these techniques, a state-of-the-art full-band judgement is obtained by statistics of likelihood on each T-F block. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs robust in different reverberant environments with coherent interferences when target speech is from the a priori known direction-of-arrivals (DOA) in distant-talking scene.