A Novel Scheme for Single-Channel Speech Dereverberation

This paper presents a novel scheme for speech dereverberation. The core of our method is a two-stage single-channel speech enhancement scheme. Degraded speech obtains a sparser representation of the linear prediction residual in the first stage of our proposed scheme by applying orthogonal matching pursuit on overcomplete bases, trained by the K-SVD algorithm. Our method includes an estimation of reverberation and mixing time from a recorded hand clap or a simulated room impulse response, which are used to create a time-domain envelope. Late reverberation is suppressed at the second stage by estimating its energy from the previous envelope and removed with spectral subtraction. Further speech enhancement is applied on minimizing the background noise, based on optimal smoothing and minimum statistics. Experimental results indicate favorable quality, compared to two state-of-the-art methods, especially in real reverberant environments with increased reverberation and background noise.