A Two-Stage Approach for Noisy-Reverberant Speech Intelligibility Improvement

In this paper, a two-stage time domain technique is proposed to improve intelligibility of speech signals under noisy-reverberant conditions. In this method, the NNESE and ARAnsd methods are jointly taken into account to mitigate the effects of noise and reverberation separately. Additionally, the resulting approach is adaptive in the sense that no prior knowledge of speech statistics or room information is required. Two intelligibility measures (ASII ST and ESII) are used for objective evaluation. The results show that the proposed two-stage scheme leads to a higher intelligibility improvement when compared to competing methods, specially for low SNR values. Furthermore, the PESQ and the updated version of the SRMR quality measure (SRMRnorm ) demonstrate that the proposed technique also attains quality improvement.