A robust interaural time differences estimation and dereverberation algorithm based on the coherence function

Abstract

A novel scheme of binaural sound localization and dereverberation in reverberation environment is present in this paper. The performance of cross-correlation based traditional time-delay estimation method is degraded sharply in a reverberation environment. Some precedence effect models have been proposed to apply in cross-correlation functions, but these models are parameter-sensitive and the front-end processes are very complex. This paper firstly proposes a simple and effective time-delay estimation method based on a coherence function in which the absolute values of coherence function is used to judge the reliability of the frequency-domain signal. And then the estimated time-delay values were applied to the coherent-to-diffuse power ratio (CDR) estimator, which can be used for reverberation suppression. Experimental results showed that the proposed scheme has higher localization accuracy than traditional methods and achieve a higher PESQ scores than other CDR estimators.