Voice activity detection using the phase vector in microphone array

If desired speech source is located at different position from interference, it is possible to exploit spatial selectivity for reliable speech detection. In this paper, we propose a voice activity detector (VAD) for the microphone array system, using spatial information obtained by the eigendecomposition of multi-channel correlation matrix. We use the phase vector as a measure for VAD, which is derived from the principal eigenvector. Voice activity is detected by the log likelihood ratio test under the assumption that phase vectors of speech absent and present signals have complex Gaussian distributions. The proposed algorithm is tested with the real data recorded by 8 microphones and the result shows that it performs better than GSC-based method.