Single channel speech dereverberation using the LP residual cepstrum

Clean speech acquisition from distant microphones is often affected by the phenomenon of reverberation. In this paper, the significance of a blind single channel dereverberation method using the linear prediction (LP) residual of the reverberated speech signal is proposed. A relation between the LP residual of the clean and the reverberated speech signal is also derived using the acoustic room impulse response. However in the proposed method, the clean LP residual is computed from its reverberated counterpart by a method of cepstral subtraction. Hence there is no estimation of the acoustic room impulse response (AIR) making the method computationally simple. Experiments on speech dereverberation and distant speech recognition are conducted at various direct to reverberant ratios (DRR). The results are presented using objective measures, subjective measures, and word error rates (WER) and compared to methods available in literature to illustrate the significance of this method.