Patent ID: 8577677

Claim:
A sound source separation system using a beamforming technique configured to separate two or more different sound sources, the system comprising: a windowing processor configured to apply a plurality of windows to an integrated voice signal input through a microphone array in which beamforming is performed; a DFT transformer configured to transform the integrated voice signal to which the windows are applied through the windowing processor into a plurality of frequency-domain signals; a transfer function (TF) estimator configured to estimate transfer functions having feature values of two or more different individual voice signals from the integrated voice signal to which the windows are applied; a noise estimator configured to: determine whether stationary noise or burst noise is detected in the integrated voice signal by comparing a measured energy in one window with a measured energy in a previous window; and cancel the stationary noise or the burst noise from the one window of the integrated voice signal; and a voice signal detector configured to extract the two or more different individual voice signals from the noise-canceled integrated voice signal, wherein the noise estimator comprises: a temporary storage unit configured to temporarily store an FFT value of each window transformed through the DFT transformer; a correlation measuring unit configured to measure a correlation value between the one window with the previous window and compute the energy of the one window and the previous window; a correlation determining unit configured to determine whether the correlation value measured by the correlation measuring unit exceeds a previously set threshold value; and a burst noise detector configured to detect the stationary noise or the burst noise using the correlation value and the energy.