Performance Enhancement of Speech Intelligibility in Communication System Using Combined Beamforming (directional microphone) and Speech Filtering Method

방향성 마이크로폰과 음성 필터링을 이용한 통신 시스템의 음성 인지도 향상

The speech intelligibility is one of the most important factors in communication system. The speech intelligibility is related with speech to noise ratio. To enhance the speech to noise ratio, background noise reduction techniques are being developed. As a part of solution to noise reduction, this paper introduces directional microphone using beamforming method and speech filtering method. The directional microphone narrows the spatial range of processing signal into the direction of the target speech signal. The noise signal located in the same direction with speech still remains in the processing signal. To sort this mixed signal into speech and noise, as a following step, a speech-filtering method is applied to pick up only the speech signal from the processed signal. The speech filtering method is based on the characteristics of speech signal itself. The combined directional microphone and speech filtering method gives enhanced performance to speech intelligibility in communication system.