Blind estimation method of reverberation time based on concept of modulation transfer function

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for blindly estimating the reverberation time based on the concept of the modulation transfer function (MTF). This method estimates the reverberation time from the reverberant signal without measuring room acoustics. In the MTF-based speech dereverberation method, proposed by the authors, a process for estimating a parameter related to the reverberation time was incorporated. In this paper, we investigate whether the estimation process, previously presented by authors, works as a blind estimation method and point out a problem with their method. We then propose a new method for blindly estimating the reverberation time to resolve the problem. In the proposed method, the reverberation time is correctly estimated by inverse-MTF filtering in the modulation frequency domain. We evaluated the proposed method with their method using both artificial MTF-based signals and speech signals to show how well the proposed method correctly estimates the reverberation time in artificial reverberant environments. Results suggested that the proposed method correctly estimates reverberation times from the observed reverberant signals. [Work supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Science Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education (No. 18680017).]