Suppressing steady-state portions of speech for improving intelligibility in various reverberant environments

Proc. of China-Japan Joint Conference on Acoustics pp. 199-202, Nanjing, 2002

Suppressing steady-state portions of speech for improving intelligibility in various reverberant environments

N. Hodoshima, T. Inoue, T. Arai and A. Kusumoto

Abstract: In previous studies (Arai et al., 2001; Arai et al., 2002), we hypothesized that segments of an acoustic signal are masked by reveberation components of previous segments, degrading speech intelligibility. To reduce masking influences, we suppressed steady-state portions having more energy, but which are less crucial for speech perception. We have presently conducted a perceptual test with a set of artificial reverberations. The results indicated clear improvements for some reverberation conditions. We certified that Arai’s technique was an effective pre-processing method for improving speech intelligibility under reverberant conditions.

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