Room Impulse Response Shortening/Reshaping With Infinity- and $p$-Norm Optimization

Abstract

The purpose of room impulse response (RIR) shortening and reshaping is usually to improve the intelligibility of the received signal by prefiltering the source signal before it is played with a loudspeaker in a closed room. In an alternative, but mathematically equivalent setting, one may aim to postfilter a recorded microphone signal to remove audible echoes. While least-squares methods have mainly been used for the design of shortening/reshaping filters for RIRs until now, we propose to use the infinity- or p-norm as optimization criteria. In our method, design errors will be uniformly distributed over the entire temporal range of the shortened/reshaped global impulse response. In addition, the psychoacoustic property of masking effects is considered during the filter design, which makes it possible to significantly reduce the filter length, compared to standard approaches, without affecting the perceived performance.