An improvement of estimating sound power spectra located in a particular 2-dimensional area is proposed. We previously proposed a conventional method that estimates sound power spectra using multiple fixed beamformings in order to emphasize speech located in a particular 2-dimensional area. However, the method has one drawback that the number of areas where the active sound sources are located must be restricted. This restriction makes the method less effective when many noise source located in different areas are simultaneously active. In this paper, we reveal the cause of this restriction and determine the maximum number of areas for which the method is able to simultaneously estimate sound power spectra. Then we also introduce a procedure for investigating areas that include active sound sources to reduce the number of unknown power spectra to be estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined by experimental evaluation applied to sounds recorded in a practical environment.

A method for extracting a sound signal from a particular area that is surrounded by multiple ambient noise sources is proposed. This method performs several fixed beamformings on a pair of small microphone arrays separated from each other to estimate the signal and noise power spectra. Noise suppression is achieved by applying spectrum emphasis to the output of fixed beamforming in the frequency domain, which is derived from the estimated power spectra. In experiments performed in a room with reverberation, this method succeeded in suppressing the ambient noise, giving an SNR improvement of more than 10 dB, which is better than the performance of the conventional fixed and adaptive beamforming methods using a large-aperture microphone array. We also confirmed that this method keeps its performance even if the noise source location changes continuously or abruptly.