A binaural room impulse response database for the evaluation of dereverberation algorithms

This paper describes a new database of binaural room impulse responses (BRIR), referred to as the Aachen impulse response (AIR) database. The main field of application of this database is the evaluation of speech enhancement algorithms dealing with room reverberation. The measurements with a dummy head took place in a low-reverberant studio booth, an office room, a meeting room and a lecture room. Due to the different dimensions and acoustic properties, it covers a wide range of situations where digital hearing aids or other hands-free devices can be used. Besides the description of the database, a motivation for using binaural instead of monaural measurements is given. Furthermore an example using a coherence-based dereverberation technique is provided to show the advantage of this database for algorithm evaluation. The AIR database is being made available online.