Dual-Microphone Speech Dereverberation in a Noisy Environment

Speech signals recorded with a distant microphone usually contain reverberation and noise, which degrade the fidelity and intelligibility of speech, and the recognition performance of automatic speech recognition systems. In E. Habets (2005) presented a multi-microphone speech dereverberation algorithm to suppress late reverberation in a noise-free environment. In this paper we show how an estimate of the late reverberant energy can be obtained from noisy observations. A more sophisticated speech enhancement technique based on the optimally-modified log spectral amplitude (OM-LSA) estimator is used to suppress the undesired late reverberant signal and noise. The speech presence probability used in the OM-LSA is extended to improve the decision between speech, late reverberation and noise. Experiments using simulated and real acoustic impulse responses are presented and show significant reverberation reduction with little speech distortion