Distant talking robust speech recognition using late reflection components of room impulse response

We propose a robust and fast dereverberation technique for real-time speech recognition application. First, we effectively identify the late reflection components of the room impulse response. We use this information together with the concept of Spectral Subtraction (SS) to remove the late reflection components of the reverberant signal. In the absence of the clean speech in actual scenario, approximation is carried out in estimating the late reflection where the estimation error is corrected through multi-band SS. The multi-band coefficients are optimized during offiine training and used in the actual online dereverberation. The proposed method performs better and faster than the relevant approach using Multi-LPC and reverberant matched model. Moreover the proposed method is robust to speaker and microphone locations.