Room speech dereverberation via minimum-phase and all-pass component processing of multi-microphone signals

In this paper, a new microphone array processing technique is proposed for blind dereverberation of speech signals effected by room acoustics. It is based on the separate processing of the minimum-phase and all-pass components of multi-microphone signals. The underlying motivation for the new processor is to use spatio-temporal processing over a single set of synchronous speech segments from several microphones to reconstruct the source speech, such that, it is applicable to practical time-variant acoustic environments. Simulated room impulse responses are used to evaluate the new processor and to compare it to a conventional beam-former. A significant improvement in array gain and a reduction of reverberation in listening tests are observed.