A model for speech reverberation and intelligibility restoring filters

Abstract

The problem of removing channel effects from speech has generally been attacked by attempting to recover a time-varying filter which inverts the entire channel impulse response. We show that human listeners are insensitive to many channel conditions and that the human ear seems to respond primarily to discontinuities of the channel. As a result of these observations, a partial equalization is proposed in which the channel effects to which the ear is sensitive may be removed, without full inversion of the channel. In addition, it is shown that it is possible to build filters of arbitrary length which do not reduce speech intelligibility and do not produce annoying artifacts.