Multi-channel linear prediction-based speech dereverberation with low-rank power spectrogram approximation

In many acoustic conditions the recorded speech signals may be severely affected by reverberation, leading to a reduced speech quality and intelligibility. In this paper we focus on a blind speech dereverberation method based on multi-channel linear prediction (MCLP) in the short-time Fourier transform domain, which is typically performed in each frequency bin independently without taking into account the spectral structure of the speech signal. Since it is widely accepted that a speech spectrogram can be well approximated with a low-rank matrix, e.g., using a spectral dictionary, in this paper we propose to incorporate a low-rank matrix approximation of the speech spectrogram into the MCLP-based speech dereverberation. The low-rank approximation is obtained using nonnegative matrix factorization with Itakura-Saito divergence. Experimental results for several measured acoustic systems show that incorporating a low-rank approximation improves the dereverberation performance in terms of instrumental speech quality measures.