Improving intelligibility of speech by steady-state suppression as pre-processing in small to medium sized halls

International Workshop on Speech Dynamics by Ear, Eye, Mouth and Machine, Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2003-53, pp. 61-66, 2003

Improving intelligibility of speech by steady-state suppression as pre-processing in small to medium sized halls

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

Abstract: One of the reasons reverberation degrades speech intelligibility is the effect of overlap-masking, when segments of an acoustic signal are masked by reverberation components of previous segments (Bolt et al., 1949). To reduce overlap-masking, Arai et al. suppressed steady-state portions having more energy,but which are less crucial for speech perception, and confirmed promising results for improving speech intelligibility (Arai et al.,2002). We conducted a perceptual test with steadt-state suppression under a reverberation time of 0.4s-1.0s. The results shouwed significant improvements for some reverberation conditions and especially for stop consonants. WE certified that steady-state suppression is an effective pre-processing method for improving speech intelligibility under reverberant conditions and proved the effect of over-lap-masking.

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

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