A basic method for restoring the power envelope from a reverberant
signal was proposed by Hirobayashi {\it{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.
Keywords: Auditory filter, Gammatone, Gammachirp, IIR asymmetric
compensation filter, Filter design
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