Supervised speech dereverberation in noisy environments using exemplar-based sparse representations

© 2016 IEEE. Exemplar-based techniques, where the noisy speech is decomposed as a linear combination of the speech and noise exemplars stored in a dictionary, have been successfully used for speech enhancement in noisy environments. This paper extends this technique to achieve speech dereverberation in noisy environments by means of a nonnegative approximation of the noisy reverberant speech in the frequency domain. A novel approach for estimating the room impulse response (RIR) together with the speech and noise estimates using a non-negative matrix deconvolution (NMD)-based technique is proposed. In addition, we extend an existing technique based on nonnegative matrix factorisation (NMF) that performs speech derever-beration in noise-free environments to noisy scenarios. New estimators for jointly obtaining the RIR and exemplar weights for the NMD and NMF-based formulations are presented. The proposed techniques are evaluated on the noise-free and noisy reverberant speech in the CHiME-2 WSJ0 database and are shown to yield better speech enhancement in terms of signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR), perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and cepstral distance (CD) measures.Baby D., Van hamme H., ''Supervised speech dereverberation in noisy environments using exemplar-based sparse representations'', 41st IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech, and signal processing - ICASSP’2016, pp. 156-160, March 20-25, 2016, Shanghai, China.status: publishe