Temporal Dynamics for Blind Measurement of Room Acoustical Parameters

In this paper, short- and long-term temporal dynamic information is investigated for the blind measurement of room acoustical parameters. In particular, estimators of room reverberation time (T60) and direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) are proposed. Short-term temporal dynamic information is obtained from differential (delta) cepstral coefficients. The statistics computed from the zeroth-order delta cepstral sequence serve as input features to a support vector T60 estimator. Long-term temporal dynamic cues, on the other hand, are obtained from an auditory spectrotemporal representation of speech commonly referred to as modulation spectrum. A measure termed as reverberation-to-speech modulation energy ratio, which is computed per modulation frequency band, is proposed and serves as input to T60 and DRR estimators. Experiments show that the proposed estimators outperform a baseline system in scenarios involving reverberant speech with and without the presence of acoustic background noise. Experiments also suggest that estimators of subjective perception of spectral coloration, reverberant tail effect, and overall speech quality can be obtained with an adaptive speech-to-reverberation modulation energy ratio measure.

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