Selective Listening Point Audio Based on Blind Signal Separation and Stereophonic Technology

Kenta NIWA  Takanori NISHINO  Kazuya TAKEDA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E92-D  No.3  pp.469-476
Publication Date: 2009/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Speech and Hearing
Keyword: 
acoustic field representation,  blind source separation,  frequency-domain independent component analysis (FD-ICA),  spatial grouping, 

Full Text: PDF(753KB)

Summary: 
A sound field reproduction method is proposed that uses blind source separation and a head-related transfer function. In the proposed system, multichannel acoustic signals captured at distant microphones are decomposed to a set of location/signal pairs of virtual sound sources based on frequency-domain independent component analysis. After estimating the locations and the signals of the virtual sources by convolving the controlled acoustic transfer functions with each signal, the spatial sound is constructed at the selected point. In experiments, a sound field made by six sound sources is captured using 48 distant microphones and decomposed into sets of virtual sound sources. Since subjective evaluation shows no significant difference between natural and reconstructed sound when six virtual sources and are used, the effectiveness of the decomposing algorithm as well as the virtual source representation are confirmed.