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arXiv · 2510.27198

Reference Microphone Selection for Guided Source Separation based on the Normalized L-p Norm

Anselm Lohmann·Tomohiro Nakatani·Rintaro Ikeshita·Marc Delcroix·Shoko Araki·Simon Doclo
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Abstract

Guided Source Separation (GSS) is a popular front-end for distant automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using spatially distributed microphones. When considering spatially distributed microphones, the choice of reference microphone may have a large influence on the quality of the output signal and the downstream ASR performance. In GSS-based speech enhancement, reference microphone selection is typically performed using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is optimal for noise reduction but may neglect differences in early-to-late-reverberant ratio (ELR) across microphones. In this paper, we propose two reference microphone selection methods for GSS-based speech enhancement that are based on the normalized $\ell_p$-norm, either using only the normalized $\ell_p$-norm or combining the normalized $\ell_p$-norm and the SNR to account for both differences in SNR and ELR across microphones. Experimental evaluation using a CHiME-8 distant ASR system shows that the proposed $\ell_p$-norm-based methods outperform the baseline method, reducing the macro-average word error rate.

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Anselm Lohmann, Tomohiro Nakatani, Rintaro Ikeshita, Marc Delcroix, Shoko Araki, Simon Doclo. 2025-10-31. Reference Microphone Selection for Guided Source Separation based on the Normalized L-p Norm. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27198

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