MTF-based power envelope restoration in noisy reverberant environments

Many speech enhancement methods had been proposed to suppress the effects of noise or reverberation. Although most of methods aimed to enhance only noisy or reverberant speech, these cannot simultaneously enhance noisy reverberant speech. This paper proposes a method for restoring the power envelope from the noisy reverberant speech. This method is based on the MTF concept and does not require that the impulse response and noise conditions in the room acoustics (noisy reverberant environments) be measured. The proposed method suppresses the effects of reverberation and noise on the power envelopes by restoring the smeared MTF. We carried out 12,000 simulations of noisesuppression and dereverberation for noisy reverberant speech to objectively evaluate the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method can simultaneously work well in both noise-suppression and dereverberation.