Subjective speech quality and speech intelligibility evaluation of single-channel dereverberation algorithms

In this contribution, six different single-channel dereverberation algorithms are evaluated subjectively in terms of speech intelligibility and speech quality. In order to study the influence of the dereverberation algorithms on speech intelligibility, speech reception thresholds in noise were measured for different reverberation times. The quality ratings were obtained following the ITU-T P.835 recommendations (with slight changes for adaptation to the problem of dereverberation) and included assessment of the attributes: reverberant, colored, distorted, and overall quality. Most of the algorithms improved speech intelligibility for short as well as long reverberation times compared to the reverberant condition. The best performance in terms of speech intelligibility and quality was observed for the regularized spectral inverse approach with pre-echo removal. The overall quality of the processed signals was highly correlated with the attribute reverberant or/and distorted. To generalize the present outcomes, further studies are needed to account for the influence of the estimation errors.