Performance Comparison of Algorithms for Blind Reverberation Time Estimation from Speech
Nikolay D. Gaubitch, Heinrich W. Loellmann, Marco Jeub, Tiago Henrique Falk, Patrick A. Naylor, Peter Vary, Mike Brookes · RWTH Publications (RWTH Aachen) · 2012
The reverberation time, T60, is one of the key parameters used to quantify room acoustics. It can provide information about the qual-ity and intelligibility of speech recorded in a reverberant environ-ment, and it can be used to increase robustness to reverberation of speech processing algorithms. T60 can be determined directly from a measurement of the acoustic impulse response, but in situations where this is unavailable it must be estimated blindly from reverber-ant speech. In this contribution, we provide a study of three state-of-the-art methods for blind T60 estimation. Experimental results with a large number of talkers, simulated and measured acoustic im-pulse responses, and various levels of additive white Gaussian noise are presented. The relative merits of the three methods in terms of computational time, estimation accuracy, noise sensitivity and inter-talker variance are discussed. In general, all three methods are able to estimate the reverberation time to within 0.2 s for T60 ≤ 0.8 s and SNR ≥ 30 dB, while increasing the noise level causes overestima-tion. The relative computational speed of the three methods is also assessed. Index Terms — Reverberation time, blind estimation 1.