An adaptive multichannel speech dereverberation approach based on robust estimation

Abstract

Room reverberation usually produces adverse influence on the quality of speech in human-machine interaction scenarios. To improve the clarity and intelligibility of reverberant speech, an adaptive multichannel speech dereverberation approach is proposed in this work. Unlike the traditional least-squares cost function for speech dereverberation, a robust estimator with an adaptive parameter is adopted to define a flexible cost function of the adaptive speech dereverberation algorithm. As a consequence, the developed adaptive filtering algorithm can dynamically track the non-stationarity and non-Gaussian properties of speech so that the reverberation component of speech is effectively suppressed. Numerical simulation experiments validate the dereverberation performance of the proposed approach.