PSD estimation in Beamspace for Estimating Direct-to-Reverberant Ratio from A Reverberant Speech Signal
This addresses the problem of acoustic environment characterization for audio processing applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing PSD estimation techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of estimating the direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR) from reverberant speech signals using a microphone array, and the result showed that their method effectively estimated DRR in recordings with various environmental noise.
A method for estimation of direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR) using a microphone array is proposed. The proposed method estimates the power spectral density (PSD) of the direct sound and the reverberation using the algorithm \textit{PSD estimation in beamspace} with a microphone array and calculates the DRR of the observed signal. The speech corpus of the ACE (Acoustic Characterisation of Environments) Challenge was utilised for evaluating the practical feasibility of the proposed method. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method was able to effectively estimate the DRR from a recording of a reverberant speech signal which included various environmental noise.