Hands-free audio conferencing unit with low-complexity dereverberation

This paper proposes a dereverberation method that delivers clear sound even in reverberant environments and discuss its implementation in a hands-free audio conferencing prototype unit. The proposed method is a cost-effective single-channel algorithm; it estimates a power spectrum of reverberation based on a linear regression model in the power spectral domain and suppresses the reverberation components using spectral subtraction. The entire calculation complexity of the hands-free prototype unit is reduced for real-time implementation on a low-cost processor.