Temporal selective dereverberation of noisy speech using one microphone

Abstract

Reverberant speech can be described as sounding distant with noticeable coloration and echo. These detrimental perceptual effects are caused by early and late reflections, respectively, and reduces the fidelity and intelligibility of speech. It is well-known that the echo density of the reflections increases with time. Therefore, the temporal structure of early and late reflections differs. In this paper, we combine two different dereverberation techniques that were recently developed to suppress early and late reverberation separately. First, late reverberation is suppressed using a spectral processing technique that is based on a statistical reverberation model. Secondly, early reverberation and residual late reverberation are suppressed using a linear prediction (LP) residual processing technique. In addition, an objective measure based on the kurtosis of the LP residual is proposed to measure the coloration caused by early reflections. Experimental results demonstrate the beneficial use of the new single microphone system that reduces echo and coloration with little speech distortion.