Independent Vector Analysis Assisted Adaptive Beamfomring for Speech Source Separation with an Acoustic Vector Sensor

Acoustic vector sensor (AVS), as a compact sensor with the capabil-ity of forming a frequency-invariant spatial beampattern over the 3Dspace, has potential in source separation. A straightforward way toachieve source separation with AVS is through adaptive beamform-ing. Such a method requires the direction-of-arrival (DOA) infor-mation, which is challenging to estimate accurately in reverberantenvironments. To circumvent this issue, we present a frameworkjointly implementing adaptive beamforming and independent vectoranalysis (IVA). Different from the conventional beamforming, thepresented method only require rough DOA estimation for initializa-tion. It iteratively refines the estimates of source DOA and signalstatistics. The proposed method has great advantages of improv-ing source separation performance and enhancing DOA estimationaccuracy. Simulations demonstrate the properties of the developedmethod.