Speech Detection and Enhancement Using Single Microphone for Distant Speech Applications in Reverberant Environments

It is well known that in reverberant environments, the human auditory system has the ability to pre-process reverberant signals to compensate for reflections and obtain effective cues for improved recognition. In this study, we propose such a preprocessing technique for combined detection and enhancement of speech using a single microphone in reverberant environments for distant speech applications. The proposed system employs a framework where the target speech is synthesized using continuous auditory masks estimated from sub-band signals. Linear gammatone analysis/synthesis filter banks are used as an auditory model for sub-band processing. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated on the UT-DistantReverb corpus which consists of speech recorded in a reverberant racquetball court (T60 ∼ 9000msec). The current system shows an average improvement of 15% STNR over an existing single-channel dereverberation algorithm and 17% improvement in detecting speech frames over G729B, SOHN & Combo-SAD unsupervised speech activity detectors on actual reverberant and noisy environments.