Speech intelligibility improvement in noisy reverberant environments based on speech enhancement and inverse filtering

The speech intelligibility of indoor public address systems is degraded by reverberation and background noise. This paper proposes a preprocessing method that combines speech enhancement and inverse filtering to improve the speech intelligibility in such environments. An energy redistribution speech enhancement method was modified for use in reverberation conditions, and an auditory-model-based fast inverse filter was designed to achieve better dereverberation performance. An experiment was performed in various noisy, reverberant environments, and the test results verified the stability and effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, a listening test was carried out to compare the performance of different algorithms subjectively. The objective and subjective evaluation results reveal that the speech intelligibility is significantly improved by the proposed method.