Noise robust speech dereverberation using constrained inverse filter

A noise robust dereverberation method is presented for speech enhancement in noisy reverberant conditions. This method introduces the constraint of minimizing the noise power in the inverse filter computation of dereverberation. It is shown that there exists a tradeoff between reducing the reverberation and reducing the noise; this tradeoff can be controlled by the constraint. Inverse filtering reduces early reflections and directional noise. In addition, spectral subtraction is used to suppress the tail of the inverse-filtered reverberation and residual noise. The performance of our method is objectively and subjectively evaluated in experiments using measured room impulse responses. The results indicate that this method provides better speech quality than the conventional methods.

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