A Real-Time Speech Enhancement Framework in Noisy and Reverberated Acoustic Scenarios

This paper deals with speech enhancement in noisy reverberated environments where multiple speakers are active. The authors propose an advanced real-time speech processing front-end aimed at automatically reducing the distortions introduced by room reverberation in distant speech signals, also considering the presence of background noise, and thus to achieve a significant improvement in speech quality for each speaker. The overall framework is composed of three cooperating blocks, each one fulfilling a specific task: speaker diarization, room impulse responses identification and speech dereverberation. In particular, the speaker diarization algorithm pilots the operations performed in the other two algorithmic stages, which have been suitably designed and parametrized to operate with noisy speech observations. Extensive computer simulations have been performed by using a subset of the AMI database under different realistic noisy and reverberated conditions. Obtained results show the effectiveness of the approach.