Reverberation time estimationbased on multidelay acousticecho cancellation

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and de-reverberation technologies are increasingly important to improve the voice communication and control performance in challenging acoustic environments. In both voice over IP teleconferencing and voice command control, AEC is needed to remove the far-end speech or the playback audio from the speakers and allow the near-end speech to enter the command control system or the far-end listener. Even there is no far-end speech, the near-end speech, i.e. captured signal can be degraded by reverberation when a speaker is far away from the microphone. This reverberation interference significantly degrades speech quality and speech recognition accuracy. A spectral subtraction based approach has been used for reverberation reduction in our system. In this paper, we propose to estimate the reverberation time based on the estimated room impulse response from the multidelay acoustic echo canceller. The approach is able to effectively reduce reverberation in noisy environments while maintaining low complexity on system level.