Efficient blind estimation of subband reverberation time from speech in non-diffuse environments
Salomon Diether, Lukas Bruderer, Andreas P. Streich, Hans‐Andrea Loeliger · 2015
To respond to reverberation effectively, modern speech processing tasks like signal enhancement in digital hearing aids or distant-talking speech recognition often require precise knowledge of the acoustic situation. A common measure is the (frequency-dependent) reverberation time T60. Explicit measurement using sound excitations is not possible for most applications, therefore blind estimation of subband T60from speech signals is employed. Previous approaches are either limited to T60between 0...1.5 s, or require long speech signals and costly computation. We propose an efficient algorithm that estimates T60up to 6 s from short speech signals of no more than 20 s. In experiments with real room impulse responses (RIR) the algorithm exhibits state-of-the-art performance for T60up to 1.5 s and superior performance for longer T60.