Algorithms and evaluation on blind estimation of reverberation time

In this contribution, we propose an algorithm to analyze early and late reverberation in monaural recordings in an offline processing framework with emphasis on live recordings. This algorithm is evaluated against known state-of-the-art solutions. Our baseline method uses cepstral mean along signal blocks to acquire an estimation of the reverberation´s impulse response which is analyzed with respect to its decay characteristics. Further improvements are a cepstral lifter to increase the method´s performance by removing nonrelevant cepstral coefficients and a polynomial of second order to map the results onto final estimates. Results indicate larger deviations in the estimated decay times of late reverberations, while estimates for the early decay times are within the just noticable difference (JND) and deviate only slightly from the true values. State-of-the-art algorithms show small correlation with the true reverberation times.