Adaptive Microphone Array with Self-Delay Estimator

In real environments, it is difficult to acquire clean speech because of the noise and the reverberation in the environments. Microphone array system is the one of the most promising solution which can provide accurate acquisition of speech in noisy environments. Normally, a time delay estimator is required for an adaptive microphone array system. In this paper, an adaptive microphone array system with self-delay estimator is proposed. The generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) with an adaptive blocking matrix (ABM) is considered as an adaptive array algorithm. By showing that the ABM can estimate the relative time delay between each sensor, the proposed system utilizes the ABM not only for blocking target components in the blocked signal path, but also for estimating the relative time delay. Therefore, the proposed system requires only the GSC structure while maintaining the system performance similar to the conventional system using an additional time delay estimator as a preprocessor. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed system is identical to the conventional system that uses an additional time delay estimation module.