A two-stage algorithm for enhancement of reverberant speech

Room reverberation causes two perceptual distortions on clean speech: Coloration and long-term reverberation. These two effects correspond to two physical variables: Signal-to-reverberant energy ratio (SRR) and reverberation time, respectively. Based on this observation, we propose a two-stage algorithm that enhances reverberant speech from one-microphone recordings. In the first stage, an inverse filter is estimated to reduce coloration effects or increase SRR. The second stage employs spectral subtraction to minimize the influence of long-term reverberation. The proposed algorithm significantly improves the quality of reverberant speech. A comparison with a recent one-microphone enhancement algorithm shows that our system produces significantly better results.