A speech dereverberation method based on the MTF concept in power envelope restoration

Abstract

We previously proposed an improved method for restoring the power envelope from a reverberant signal, based on the modulation transfer function (MTF) concept in order to resolve the problems of Hirobayashi’s method. In this paper, to apply our improved method to reverberant speech, we consider three issues related to speech applications: (i) how to apply the improved method to speech dereverberation based on co-modulation characteristics; (ii) whether the MTF concept can also be applied in the sub-band for reverberant signals; and (iii) whether power envelope inverse filtering should be done separately in each channel. We propose an extended filterbank model based on these considerations. We have carried out 15,000 simulations of the power envelope restoration for reverberant speech signals, and our results have shown that the proposed model can adequately restore the power envelopes in all channels from reverberant speech signals. We also found that the estimation of the reverberation time should be done separately in each channel to improve the restoration accuracy of the power envelope.