Joint dereverberation and residual echo suppression of speech signals in noisy environments

Abstract—Hands-free devices are often used in a noisy and reverberant environment. Therefore, the received microphone signal does not only contain the desired near-end speech signal but also interferences such as room reverberation that is caused by the near-end source, background noise and a far-end echo signal that results from the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone. These interferences degrade the fidelity and intelligibility of near-end speech. In the last two decades, postfilters have been developed that can be used in conjunction with a single microphone acoustic echo canceller to enhance the near-end speech. In previous works, spectral enhancement tech-niques have been used to suppress residual echo and background noise for single microphone acoustic echo cancellers. However, dereverberation of the near-end speech was not addressed in this context. Recently, practically feasible spectral enhancemen