Sound acquisition in noisy and reverberant environments using virtual microphones

In hands-free communication applications, the main goal is to capture desired sounds, while reducing noise and interfering sounds. However, for natural-sounding telepresence systems, the spatial sound image should also be preserved. Using a recently proposed method for generating the signal of a virtual microphone (VM), one can recreate the sound image from an arbitrary point of view in the sound scene (e.g., close to a desired speaker), while being able to place the physical microphones outside the sound scene. In this paper, we present a method for synthesizing a VM signal in noisy and reverberant environments, where the estimation of the required direct and diffuse sound components is performed using two multichannel linear filters. The direct sound component is estimated using a multichannel Wiener filter, while the diffuse sound component is estimated using a linearly constrained minimum variance filter followed by a single-channel Wiener filter. Simulations in a noisy and reverberant environment show the applicability of the proposed method for sound acquisition in a scenario in which two microphone arrays are installed in a large TV.