Multi-channel speech compression system and method

A computer program product residing on a non-transitory computer readable medium having a plurality of instructions stored thereon which, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising:

• generating a plurality of acoustic relative transfer functions between a plurality of audio acquisition devices of an audio recording system based upon, at least in part, one or more of a predefined speech processing application and a predefined acoustic environment;
• generating an acoustic relative transfer function codebook using the plurality of acoustic relative transfer functions;
• and
• encoding selected one or more acoustic relative transfer functions of the plurality of acoustic relative transfer functions into a vector of acoustic relative transfer functions and transmitting the vector of acoustic relative transfer functions and a vector of acoustic relative transfer function codebook entries for the plurality of audio acquisition devices of the audio recording system using the acoustic relative transfer function codebook known to both a front-end speech processing system and a back-end speech processing system.