Suppressing steady-state portions of speech for improving intelligibility in various reverberant environments

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 reverberation 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.