Pitch-Based Segregation of Reverberant Speech
Abstract
In everyday listening, both background noise and reverberation degrade the speech signal. Psychoacoustic evidence suggests that human speech perception under reverberant conditions relies primarily on monaural processing. While speech segregation based on periodicity has achieved considerable progress in handling additive noise, little research in monaural segregation has been devoted to reverberant scenarios. Reverberation smears the harmonic structure of speech signals, and our evaluations using a pitch-based segregation algorithm show that an increase in the room reverberation time causes a degradation in performance due to the loss in periodicity for the target signal. We propose a two-stage monaural separation system that combines the inverse filtering of the room impulse response corresponding to target location with a pitch-based speech segregation method. As a result of the first stage, the harmonicity of a signal arriving from target direction is partially restored while signals arriving from other locations are further smeared, and this leads to improved segregation. A systematic evaluation of the system shows that the proposed system results in considerable signal-to-noise ratio gains across different conditions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- AD1001150
Entities
People
- DeLiang Wang
- Nicoleta Roman
Organizations
- Ohio State University