Speech Reinforcement in Noisy Reverberant Conditions Under an Approximation of the Short-Time SII

While most contributions on speech reinforcement only consider the presence of environmental noise, late reverberation can also severely degrade the intelligibility of speech. In this paper we address the problem of speech reinforcement in noisy and reverberant environments. We use a short-time version of a recently presented approximation of the speech intelligibility index, which we optimize locally. The resulting time-frequency dependent amplification depends on both the noise and late reverberation power spectral density. The latter is estimated using the Polack model and assumes that prior knowledge of the room geometry is available. Speech intelligibility improvements of around 20% are observed.