  One of the biggest challenges in multi-microphone applications is the
estimation of the parameters of the signal model such as the power spectral
densities (PSDs) of the sources, the early (relative) acoustic transfer
functions of the sources with respect to the microphones, the PSD of late
reverberation, and the PSDs of microphone-self noise. Typically, the existing
methods estimate subsets of the aforementioned parameters and assume some of
the other parameters to be known a priori. This may result in inconsistencies
and inaccurately estimated parameters and potential performance degradation in
the applications using these estimated parameters. So far, there is no method
to jointly estimate all the aforementioned parameters. In this paper, we
propose a robust method for jointly estimating all the aforementioned
parameters using confirmatory factor analysis. The estimation accuracy of the
signal-model parameters thus obtained outperforms existing methods in most
cases. We experimentally show significant performance gains in several
multi-microphone applications over state-of-the-art methods.
