Dual-Channel Cosine Function Based ITD Estimation for Robust Speech Separation

In speech separation tasks, many separation methods have the limitation that the microphones are closely spaced, which means that these methods are unprevailing for phase wrap-around. In this paper, we present a novel speech separation scheme by using two microphones that does not have this restriction. The technique utilizes the estimation of interaural time difference (ITD) statistics and binary time-frequency mask for the separation of mixed speech sources. The novelties of the paper consist in: (1) the extended application of delay-and-sum beamforming (DSB) and cosine function for ITD calculation; and (2) the clarification of the connection between ideal binary mask and DSB amplitude ratio. Our objective quality evaluation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.