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Auteurs principaux: Middelberg, Wiebke, Lee, Jung-Suk, Sereshki, Saeed Bagheri, Aroudi, Ali, Tourbabin, Vladimir, Wong, Daniel D. E.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09350
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author Middelberg, Wiebke
Lee, Jung-Suk
Sereshki, Saeed Bagheri
Aroudi, Ali
Tourbabin, Vladimir
Wong, Daniel D. E.
author_facet Middelberg, Wiebke
Lee, Jung-Suk
Sereshki, Saeed Bagheri
Aroudi, Ali
Tourbabin, Vladimir
Wong, Daniel D. E.
contents Enhancing the user's own-voice for head-worn microphone arrays is an important task in noisy environments to allow for easier speech communication and user-device interaction. However, a rarely addressed challenge is the change of the microphones' transfer functions when one or more of the microphones gets occluded by skin, clothes or hair. The underlying problem for beamforming-based speech enhancement is the (potentially rapidly) changing transfer functions of both the own-voice and the noise component that have to be accounted for to achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we address the problem of an occluded microphone in a head-worn microphone array. We investigate three alternative mitigation approaches by means of (i) conventional adaptive beamforming, (ii) switching between a-priori estimates of the beamformer coefficients for the occluded and unoccluded state, and (iii) a hybrid approach using a switching-adaptive beamformer. In an evaluation with real-world recordings and simulated occlusion, we demonstrate the advantages of the different approaches in terms of noise reduction, own-voice distortion and robustness against voice activity detection errors.
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spellingShingle Microphone Occlusion Mitigation for Own-Voice Enhancement in Head-Worn Microphone Arrays Using Switching-Adaptive Beamforming
Middelberg, Wiebke
Lee, Jung-Suk
Sereshki, Saeed Bagheri
Aroudi, Ali
Tourbabin, Vladimir
Wong, Daniel D. E.
Audio and Speech Processing
Enhancing the user's own-voice for head-worn microphone arrays is an important task in noisy environments to allow for easier speech communication and user-device interaction. However, a rarely addressed challenge is the change of the microphones' transfer functions when one or more of the microphones gets occluded by skin, clothes or hair. The underlying problem for beamforming-based speech enhancement is the (potentially rapidly) changing transfer functions of both the own-voice and the noise component that have to be accounted for to achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we address the problem of an occluded microphone in a head-worn microphone array. We investigate three alternative mitigation approaches by means of (i) conventional adaptive beamforming, (ii) switching between a-priori estimates of the beamformer coefficients for the occluded and unoccluded state, and (iii) a hybrid approach using a switching-adaptive beamformer. In an evaluation with real-world recordings and simulated occlusion, we demonstrate the advantages of the different approaches in terms of noise reduction, own-voice distortion and robustness against voice activity detection errors.
title Microphone Occlusion Mitigation for Own-Voice Enhancement in Head-Worn Microphone Arrays Using Switching-Adaptive Beamforming
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09350