Multimicrophone speech dereverberation using spatiotemporal and spectral processing

— Speech signals acquired in a reverberant room with microphones positioned at a distance from the talker are degraded in quality due to reverberation and measurement noise. Therefore, enhancement of reverberant speech is important in hands-free telecommunications applications. The perceptual effects of reverberation can be linked to the room impulse response (RIR) between the talker and the microphone and are characterized by: (i) colouration, due to the strong early reflections and (ii) a distant ‘echoey’ quality due to the decaying tail of the RIR. Accordingly, we present a two-stage multimicrophone method for speech dereverberation. First, spatiotemporal averaging is performed on the linear prediction residual, which primarily reduces the effects of the early reflections. Secondly, a spectral subtraction method is employed to reduce late reverberation. Simulation results with measured RIRs and additive white Gaussian noise illustrate the performance of this method and show ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISCAS
• Authors: Nikolay D. Gaubitch, Emanuel A. P. Habets, Patrick A. Naylor
• Keywords: Additive White Gaussian Noise, Early Reflections, Hardware, ISCAS 2008, Reverberation