Room impulse response shortening with infinity-norm optimization

The purpose of room impulse response (RIR) shortening is to improve the intelligibility of the received signal by prefiltering the source signal before it is played with a loudspeaker in a closed room. In this paper, we propose to use the infinity-norm as optimization criterion for the design of shortening filters of RIRs. Similar to the equiripple filter design method, design errors will be uniformly distributed over the unwanted temporal range of the shortened global impulse response. The D50 measure is exploited during the design of the shortening filter, which makes it possible to significantly reduce the length of the prefilter without affecting the perceived performance.