Dereverberation in the spatial audio coding domain

Spatial audio coding techniques are fundamental for recording, coding and rendering spatial sound. Especially in teleconferencing, spatial sound reproduction helps in making a conversation feel more natural reducing the listening effort. However, if the acoustic sources are far from the microphone arrangement, the rendered sound may easily be corrupted by reverberation. This contribution proposes a dereverberation technique, which is integrated efficiently into the parameter domain of Directional Audio Coding (DirAC). Utilizing DirAC's signal model we derive a parametric method to reduce the diffuse portion of the recorded signal. Instrumental quality measures and informal listening tests confirm the efficiency of the proposed method to render a spatial sound scene less reverberant without introducing noticeable artifacts.