Cooperative Audio Source Separation and Enhancement Using Distributed Microphone Arrays and Wearable Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative system that combines wearable devices and distributed microphone arrays to improve real-time audio source separation and enhancement in noisy, reverberant environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cooperative framework that utilizes distributed microphone arrays and wearable devices for real-time audio processing, overcoming delay constraints.

Findings

Effective separation of 10 speech sources in a large room

Real-time binaural enhancement filters improve audio clarity

System demonstrates robustness in reverberant environments

Abstract

Augmented listening devices such as hearing aids often perform poorly in noisy and reverberant environments with many competing sound sources. Large distributed microphone arrays can improve performance, but data from remote microphones often cannot be used for delay-constrained real-time processing. We present a cooperative audio source separation and enhancement system that leverages wearable listening devices and other microphone arrays spread around a room. The full distributed array is used to separate sound sources and estimate their statistics. Each listening device uses these statistics to design real-time binaural audio enhancement filters using its own local microphones. The system is demonstrated experimentally using 10 speech sources and 160 microphones in a large, reverberant room.