Implementation of steady-state suppression using a digital signal processor for real-time processing: Evaluation of the processing in an actual hall

International Workshop on Frontiers in Speech and Hearing Research, Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2005-167, pp. 25-30, 2006

Implementation of steady-state suppression using a digital signal processor for real-time processing: Evaluation of the processing in an actual hall

K. Takahashi, T. Goto, F. Tadokoro, K. Yasu and T. Arai

Abstract: In an actual hall, reverberation degrades speech intelligibility, which is the result of overlap-masking occurred when segments of an acoustic signal are affected by reverberation components of previous segments. Arai et al. (2001, 2002) have been proposed a pre-processing technique which suppresses steady-state portion of speech in order to prevent the result of overlap-masking. However, the originally proposed technique is not suitable for real-time processing. Therefore, Arai et al. (2003) suggested alternative technique based on the First Fourier Transform (FFT) with cepstral analysis in order to implement real-time processing.

In this study, we successfully implemented the real-time processing of steady-state suppression based on the FFT with a digital signal processor (DSP) (Goto et al., 2005). Also, the effectiveness of the real-time processing implemented with a DSP was evaluated for younger as well as elderly people in an actual reverberant environment.

Keywords: Real-time processing, Digital signal processor, Reverberation, Speech enhancement, Steady-state suppression

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