An improved method based on the MTF concept for restoring the power envelope from a reverberant signal

Abstract

A basic method for restoring the power envelope from a reverberant signal was proposed by Hirobayashi et al. This method is based on the concept of the modulation transfer function (MTF) and does not require that the impulse response of an environment be measured. However this basic method has the following problems: (i) how to precisely extract the power envelope from the observed signal; (ii) how to determine the parameters of the impulse response of the room acoustics; and (iii) a lack of consideration as to whether the MTF concept can be applied to a more realistic signal. This paper improves this basic method with regard to these problems in order to extend this method as a first step towards the development for speech applications. We have carried out 1,500 simulations for restoring the power envelope from reverberant signals in which the power envelopes are three types of sinusoidal, harmonics, and band-limited noise and the carriers are white noise, to evaluate our improved method with regard to (i) and (ii). We then have carried out the same simulations in which the carriers are two types of carrier of white noise or harmonics with regard to (iii). Our results have shown that the improved method can adequately restore the power envelope from a reverberant signal and will be able to be applied for speech envelope restoration.