Noise-robust reverberation time estimation using spectral decay distributions with reduced computational cost

Reverberation Time (T₆₀) is an important measure of the acoustic properties of a room. It can provide information about the acoustic environment, the intelligibility, and quality of speech recorded in the room, and help improve the performance of speech processing algorithms with reverberant speech. Where the acoustic impulse response of the room is not available, the T₆₀ must be estimated non-intrusively from reverberant speech. State-of-the-art non-intrusive T₆₀ estimators have been shown to be strongly biased in the presence of noise. We describe a novel T₆₀ estimation algorithm based on spectral decay distributions that provides robustness to additive noise for a range of realistic noise types for signal-to-noise ratios in the range 0 to 35 dB and T₆₀s between 200 and 950 ms. The proposed method also has much reduced computational cost.