Adaptive Reverberation Absorption Using Non-Stationary Masking Components Detection For Intelligibility Improvement

This letter proposes a new time domain absorption approach designed to reduce masking components of speech signals under noisy-reverberant conditions. In this method, the non-stationarity of corrupted signal segments is used to detect masking distortions based on a defined threshold. The non-stationarity is objectively measured and is also adopted to determine the absorption procedure. Additionally, no prior knowledge of speech statistics or room information is required for this technique. Two intelligibility measures (ESII and ASIIst) are used for objective evaluation. The results show that the proposed scheme leads to a higher intelligibility improvement when compared to competing methods. A perceptual listening test is further considered and corroborates these results. Furthermore, the updated version of the SRMR quality measure (SRMRnorm) demonstrates that the proposed technique also attains quality improvement.