  Distant speech processing is a challenging task, especially when dealing with
the cocktail party effect. Sound source separation is thus often required as a
preprocessing step prior to speech recognition to improve the signal to
distortion ratio (SDR). Recently, a combination of beamforming and speech
separation networks have been proposed to improve the target source quality in
the direction of arrival of interest. However, with this type of approach, the
neural network needs to be trained in advance for a specific microphone array
geometry, which limits versatility when adding/removing microphones, or
changing the shape of the array. The solution presented in this paper is to
train a neural network on pairs of microphones with different spacing and
acoustic environmental conditions, and then use this network to estimate a
time-frequency mask from all the pairs of microphones forming the array with an
arbitrary shape. Using this mask, the target and noise covariance matrices can
be estimated, and then used to perform generalized eigenvalue (GEV)
beamforming. Results show that the proposed approach improves the SDR from 4.78
dB to 7.69 dB on average, for various microphone array geometries that
correspond to commercially available hardware.
