Is the Ideal Ratio Mask Really the Best? -- Exploring the Best Extraction Performance and Optimal Mask of Mask-based Beamformers

This study investigates mask-based beamformers (BFs), which estimate filters to extract target speech using time-frequency masks. Although several BF methods have been proposed, the following aspects are yet to be comprehensively investigated. 1) Which BF can provide the best extraction performance in terms of the closeness of the BF output to the target speech? 2) Is the optimal mask for the best performance common for all BFs? 3) Is the ideal ratio mask (IRM) identical to the optimal mask? Accordingly, we investigate these issues considering four mask-based BFs: the maximum signal-to-noise ratio BF, two variants of this, and the multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) BF. To obtain the optimal mask corresponding to the peak performance for each BF, we employ an approach that minimizes the mean square error between the BF output and target speech for each utterance. Via the experiments with the CHiME-3 dataset, we verify that the four BFs have the same peak performance as the upper bound provided by the ideal MWF BF, whereas the optimal mask depends on the adopted BF and differs from the IRM. These observations differ from the conventional idea that the optimal mask is common for all BFs and that peak performance differs for each BF. Hence, this study contributes to the design of mask-based BFs.