Decay Rate Estimators and Their Performance for Blind Reverberation Time Estimation

Several approaches for blind estimation of reverberation time have been presented in the literature and decay rate estimation is an integral part of many, if not all, of such approaches. This paper provides both an analytical and experimental comparison, in terms of the bias and variance of three common decay rate estimators; a straight-forward linear regression approach as well as two maximum-likelihood based methods. Situations with and without interfering additive noise are considered. It is shown that the linear regression based approach is unbiased if no smoothing is applied, and that the estimation variance in the absence of noise is constantly about twice that of the maximum-likelihood based methods. It is shown that the methods that do not take possible noise into account suffer from similar estimation bias in the presence of noise. Further, a hybrid method, combining the noise robustness and low computational complexity advantages of the two different maximum-likelihood based methods, is presented.