SAMbA: Speech enhancement with Asynchronous ad-hoc Microphone Arrays

Speech enhancement in ad-hoc microphone arrays is often hindered by the asynchronization of the devices composing the microphone array. Asynchronization comes from sampling time offset and sampling rate offset which inevitably occur when the microphones are embedded in different hardware components. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement solution that is suited for applications in ad-hoc microphone arrays because it is distributed and copes with asynchronization. We show that asynchronization has a limited impact on the spatial filtering and mostly affects the performance of the DNNs. Instead of resynchronising the signals, which requires costly processing steps, we use an attention mechanism which makes the DNNs, thus our whole pipeline, robust to asynchronization. We also show that the attention mechanism leads to the asynchronization parameters in an unsupervised manner.