A multi-channel maximum likelihood approach to de-reverberation

Reverberation can severely degrade the intelligibility of speech. Blind de-reverberation aims at restoring the original signal by attenuating the reverberation without prior knowledge of the surrounding acoustic environment nor of the source. In this paper, single-channel and multi-channel de-reverberation structures are compared and the advantages of the multi-channel approach are discussed. We propose an adaptive multi-channel blind de-reverberation algorithm based on a maximum likelihood approach that exploits results relating to the multiple input/output inverse theorem (MINT). The performance of the algorithm is illustrated using an eight-channel linear microphone array placed in a real room. Simulation results show that the algorithm can achieve very good de-reverberation when the channels are time aligned.