| Summary: | <p>The astronauts? ability to communicate easily among themselves or with the ship?s computer should be a high priority for the success of missions. Long-duration space habitats--whether spaceships or surface bases--will likely be larger than present-day Earth-to-orbit/Moon transfer ships. Hence an efficient approach would be to free the crew members from the relative burden of having to wear headsets throughout the spacecraft. This can be achieved by placing microphone arrays in all crew-accessible parts of the habitat. Processing algorithms would first localize the speaker and then perform speech enhancement. The background "noise" in a spacecraft is typically fan and duct noise (hum, drone), valve opening/closing (click, hiss), pumps, etc. We simulate such interfering sources by a number of loudspeakers broadcasting various sounds: real ISS sounds, a continuous radio stream, and a poem read by one author. To test the concept, we use a linear 30-microphone array driven by a zero-latency professional audio interface. Speaker localization is obtained by
time-domain processing. To enhance the speech-to-noise ratio, a frequency-domain minimum-variance approach is used.
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