In hands-free telephony, spatial filtering techniques are employed to enhance intelligibility of speech. More precisely, these techniques aim at reducing the reverberation of the desired speech signal and attenuating interferences. Additionally, it is well-known that the spatially separate reproduction of desired and interfering sources enhance intelligibility of speech. For the latter task, Directional Audio Coding (DirAC) has proven to be an efficient method to capture and reproduce spatial sound. In this contribution, we propose a spatial filtering processing block, which works in the parameter domain of DirAC. Simulation results show that compared to a standard beamformer the novel technique offers significantly higher interference attenuation, while introducing comparably low distortion of the desired signal. Additional subjective tests of speech intelligibility confirm the instrumentally obtained results.
Authors:
Kallinger, Markus; Ochsenfeld, Henning; Del Galdo, Giovanni; Kuech, Fabian; Mahne, Dirk; Schultz-Amling, Richard; Thiergart, Oliver
Affiliation:
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen, Germany
AES Convention:
126 (May 2009)
Paper Number:
7653
Publication Date:
May 1, 2009
Subject:
Audio for Telecommunications
Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.
No AES members have commented on this paper yet.
To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.
If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.