Inverse Filtering for Speech Dereverberation Less Sensitive to Noise and Room Transfer Function Fluctuations

Abstract

Inverse filtering of room transfer functions (RTFs) is considered an attractive approach for speech dereverberation given that the time invariance assumption of the used RTFs holds. However, in a realistic environment, this assumption is not necessarily guaranteed, and the performance is degraded because the RTFs fluctuate over time and the inverse filter fails to remove the effect of the RTFs. The inverse filter may amplify a small fluctuation in the RTFs and may cause large distortions in the filter's output. Moreover, when interference noise is present at the microphones, the filter may also amplify the noise. This paper proposes a design strategy for the inverse filter that is less sensitive to such disturbances. We consider that reducing the filter energy is the key to making the filter less sensitive to the disturbances. Using this idea as a basis, we focus on the influence of three design parameters on the filter energy and the performance, namely, the regularization parameter, modeling delay, and filter length. By adjusting these three design parameters, we confirm that the performance can be improved in the presence of RTF fluctuations and interference noise.