This invention relates to a method of signal processing and apparatus therefor.
In many situations, observations are made of the output of a multiple input and multiple output system such as phase array radar system, sonar array system or microphone array system, from which it is desired to recover the wanted signal alone with all the unwanted signals, including noise, cancelled or suppressed. For example, in a microphone array system for a speech recognition application, the objective is to enhance the target speech signal in the presence of background noise and competing speakers.
The most widely used approach to noise or interference cancellation in a multiple channel case was suggested by Widrow etc in “Adaptive Antenna Systems” Proc. IEEE, Vol. 55 No. 12, Dec. 1967 and “Signal Cancellation Phenomena in Antennas: causes and cures”, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., Vol.AP30, May 1982. Also by L. J. Griffiths etc in “An Alternative Approach to Linearly Constrained Adaptive Beamforming”. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. VolAP30, 1982. In these and other similar approaches, the signal processing apparatus separates the observed signal into a primary channel which comprises both the target signal and the interference signal and noise, and a secondary channel which comprises interference signal and noise alone. The interference signals and noise in the primary channel are estimated using an adaptive filter having the secondary channel signal as input, the estimated interference and noise signal being subtracted from the primary channel to obtain the desired target signal. There are two major drawbacks of the above approaches. The first is that it is assumed that the secondary channel comprises interference signals and noise only. This assumption may not be correct in practice due to leakage of wanted signals into the secondary channel due to hardware imperfections and limited array dimension. The second is that it is assumed that the interference signals and noise can be estimated accurately from the secondary channel. This assumption may also not be correct in practice because this will required a large number of degrees of freedom, this implying a very long filter and large array dimension. A very long filter leads to other problems such as rate of convergence and instability.
The first drawback will lead to signal cancellation. This degrades the performance of the apparatus. Depending on the input signal power, this degradation may be severe, leading to poor quality of the reconstructed speech because a portion of the desired signal is also cancelled by the filtering process. The second drawback will lead to poor interference and noise cancellation especially low frequency interference signals the wavelengths of which are many times the dimension of the array.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved signal processing apparatus and method.