Joint noise and reverberation suppression for speech applications

Abstract

An algorithm for joint suppression of noise and reverberation from speech signals is presented. The method requires a handclap recording that precedes speech activity. A running kurtosis technique is applied in order to extract an estimation of the late reflections of the room impulse response from the clap while a moving average filter is employed for the noise estimation. Moreover, the excitation signal derived from the Linear Prediction (LP) analysis of the noisy speech along with the estimated power spectrum of the late reflections are used to suppress late reverberation through spectral subtraction while a Wiener filter compensates for the ambient noise. A gain magnitude regularization step is also implemented to reduce overestimation errors. Objective and subjective results show that the proposed method achieves significant speech enhancement in all tested cases.