Speech dereverberation and noise reduction with a combined microphone array approach

In this contribution we have addressed the problem of speech enhancement in noisy and reverberant rooms through the use of a new approach that combines the dereverberation abilities of a structure based in the separate processing of the minimum-phase and all-pass components of the input speech signals, and the noise rejection performance of a speech-activity-based Wiener filter able to cope both with coherent and diffuse noise. Experiments have been performed with the CMU real multichannel database, which includes a clean speech reference through a head-mounted microphone. This reference signal have been also used to perform simulation experiments in controlled conditions. Extensive results have been obtained, both with log area ratio and cepstral distances of input and processed signals to the reference, and with segSNR improvements, assessing the abilities of the new system to cope both with reverberation and coherent and diffuse noise in different acoustic environments.