An evaluation measure for reverberant speech using decay tail modelling

An objective measure for the perceived effect of reverberation is an essential tool for research into dereverberation algorithms or acoustic space modeling. There are two different effects that contribute to the total perceived reverberation, colouration and the reverberation tail effect. This paper presents an objective reverberation decay tail measure R_DT, and measures perceptually the reverberation tail effect directly from speech. R_DT uses the perceptually weighted Bark Spectral Distortion (BSD) in conjunction with an endpoint search algorithm and decay tail modelling. The measure was evaluated against T₆₀ and BSD for colourless and constant colouration reverberation impulse responses.