Blind Dereverberation using Maximum Kurtosis of the Speech Residual

Reverberation in speech, caused by room reflections, is problematic specially for hands-free telephonic applications in a confined space. The problem is even severe for hearing impaired people. Therefore blind speech dereverberation is an important research area. The task is to remove reverberation from the output of a room, where the room impulse response, as well as the clean speech signal is unknown. The method discussed herein maximizes the fourth order cumulant, referred to as Kurtosis, of the Linear Prediction (LP) residual of the speech to remove reverberation from the degraded speech. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Prof. Peter Kabal for his guidance, support, and unconventional brilliance. In addition, many discussions with people in the TSP lab, especially Hoda Daou, and Marc-Antoine Rondeau have helped in the development of this work.