Estimation of the frequency dependent reverberation time by means of warped filter-banks

Abstract

An improved approach for the estimation of the frequency dependent reverberation time (RT) by means of allpass transformed filter-banks is presented. It is shown that by means of these warped filter-banks, a much more accurate RT estimation at lower frequencies can be obtained than by octave filter-banks, which are commonly used for the estimation of the frequency dependent RT. Furthermore, allpass transformed filter-banks can achieve a much better approximation of the non-uniform frequency resolution of the human auditory system than octave filter-banks. A uniform or non-uniform (auditory) frequency resolution can thereby be simply adjusted by a single allpass coefficient. The RT estimation can be done with an allpass transformed DFT or DCT filter-bank. The warped DCT filter-bank is of special interest as it provides real-valued subband signals. This facilitates the use of a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator for either a non-blind estimation of the frequency dependent RT from a room impulse response or a blind estimation from a reverberant speech signal.