REAL-TIME MICROPHONE ARRAY WITH ROBUST BEAMFORMER AND POSTFILTER FOR SPEECH ENHANCEMENT AND METHOD OF OPERATION THEREOF

A microphone array processing system and method carried out in the system. In one embodiment, the system includes: (1) a beamformer configured to perform adaptive beamforming on gain-compensated signals received from a plurality of microphones, the adaptive beamforming including dynamic range compression and diagonal loading of a sample correlation matrix based on order statistics and (2) a postfilter configured to receive an output of the beamformer and reduce noise components remaining from the beamforming.