Neural beamforming for speech enhancement: Preliminary results

In the field of multi-channel speech quality enhancement, beamforming algorithms play a key role, being able to reduce noise and reverberation by spatial filtering. To that extent, an accurate knowledge of the Direction of Arrival (DOA) is crucial for the beamforming to be effective. This paper reports extremely improved DOA estimates with the use of a recently introduced neural DOA estimation technique, when compared to a reference algorithm such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC). These findings motivated for the evaluation of beamforming with neural DOA estimation in the field of speech enhancement. By using the neural DOA estimation in conjunction with beamforming, speech signals affected by reverberation and noise improve their quality. These first findings are reported to be taken as a reference for further works related to beamforming for speech enhancement.