Extracting reverberant sounds using multiple microphones

Sound acquisition with microphone arrays in reverberant environments typically aims at capturing the direct sound of the sound sources while attenuating noise and reverberation. In applications such as immersive spatial sound reproduction also the reverberant sound represents a desired signal which needs to be extracted from the sound scene. While source separation and dereverberation is well addressed in literature, only few approaches exist for extracting reverberant sound. In this paper, a linearly constrained minimum variance filter is proposed to obtain an estimate of the sound pressure of the reverberant field. The proposed spatial filter provides an almost omnidirectional directivity pattern with spatial nulls for the direction-of-arrival of the direct sound. The proposed spatial filter is computationally efficient and outperforms existing single-channel approaches.