A practical approach for improving the robustness of MVDR beamformers

Nguyen Thi Huyen Chau
Faculty of Information Technology, Thang Long University, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
Quan Trong The
Blockchain Lab, Faculty of Information Security, Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (PTIT), Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
Pham Van Ha
School of Information & Communications Technology, Hanoi University of Industry, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam

Article ID: 4413

Keywords: microphone array; beamforming; noise reduction; speech enhancement; the signal-to-noise ratio; minimum variance distortionless response

Abstract

Microphone array (MA) owns the convenience of alleviating the background noise field, interference, and third-party speakers while preserving the original speech component with a high directivity index perspective. MA beamforming utilizes prior spatial information about the direction of arrival of useful signals, the characteristics of the surrounding noise field, the designed geometry of MA, and the obtained parameters after processing received array signals to achieve the advantages of speech enhancement and noise reduction. Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) beamformer has the capability of attenuating the surrounding noise field, interference, or third-party talker while saving the original speech component of the desired talker at a specified location. However, under realistic recording scenarios, due to the complex and annoying situation, the movement of the talker during conversation, the error of internal settings for capturing the noisy mixture, the error of sampling frequency, the different time of starting recording of two microphones, the overall effectiveness of the MVDR beamformer is often degraded because of speech distortion and musical noise. In this article, the author proposed an efficient method for enhancing the robustness of the MVDR beamformer under complex and annoying situations. The numerical simulations have shown that the speech distortion was reduced to 5 dB, the musical and residual noise were suppressed to 15.2 dB, and the speech quality was increased from 12.1 to 12.9 dB.

Published

2026-07-24

How to Cite

Chau, N. T. H., The, Q. T., & Ha, P. V. (2026). A practical approach for improving the robustness of MVDR beamformers . Sound & Vibration, 60(5). https://doi.org/10.59400/sv4413

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Vol. 60 No. 5 (2026): In Progress

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Article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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