A perceptually constrained channel shortening technique for speech dereverberation

The objective of acoustic multichannel equalization is to design a reshaping filter that reduces reverberation, improves the perceptual speech quality, and is robust to errors in the estimated room impulse responses (RIRs). Although the channel shortening (CS) technique has been shown to be effective in achieving dereverberation, it may fail to preserve the natural shape of an RIR leading to speech quality degradation. Furthermore, CS yields multiple reshaping filters that satisfy its optimization criterion but result in a different perceptual speech quality. In this paper, we propose a robust perceptually constrained channel shortening technique (PeCCS) that resolves the selection ambiguity of CS and leads to joint dereverberation and speech quality preservation. Simulation results for erroneously estimated RIRs show that PeCCS preserves the perceptual speech quality and results in a higher reverberant tail suppression than other state-of-the-art techniques, such as CS and the regularized partial multichannel equalization technique based on the multiple-input/output inverse theorem (P-MINT).