Suppressing steady-state portions of speech for improving intelligibility as pre-processing: Under various reverberant environments

Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2002-65, pp. 47-51, 2002 (in Japanese)

Suppressing steady-state portions of speech for improving intelligibility as pre-processing: Under various reverberant environments

N. Hodoshima, T. Inoue, T. Arai, K. Kinoshita 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 reverberation 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 to explore the relationship between steady-state suppression and several reverberration conditions. 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.

Keywords: speech enhancement, reverberation, speech intelligibility, masking, steady-state suppression

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