A new cascaded spectral subtraction approach for binaural speech dereverberation and its application in source separation

In this work we propose a new binaural spectral subtraction method for the suppression of late reverberation. The proposed approach is a cascade of three stages. The first two stages exploit distinct observations to model and suppress the late reverberation by deriving a gain function. The musical noise artifacts generated due to the processing at each stage are compensated by smoothing the spectral magnitudes of the weighting gains. The third stage linearly combines the gains obtained from the first two stages and further enhances the binaural signals. The binaural gains, obtained by independently processing the left and right channel signals are combined using a new method. Experiments on real data are performed in two contexts: dereverberation-only and joint dereverberation and source separation. Objective results verify the suitability of the proposed cascaded approach in both the contexts.