Probabilistic integration of diffuse noise suppression and dereverberation

This paper deals with joint suppression of diffuse noise and reverberation, to enhance perceived speech quality and speech recognition performance. Although diffuse noise and reverberation are both omnipresent in the real world, conventional methods have modeled only one while neglecting the other. In contrast, we propose a novel joint suppression method that employs a unified probabilistic model of observed signals affected by both diffuse noise and reverberation. Through likelihood maximization, this unified model enables proper parameter estimation that takes into account both diffuse noise and reverberation. As a byproduct, we also propose a novel method for diffuse noise suppression. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint suppression method in terms of dereverberation and denoising.