Abstract
Acoustic reverberation will be introduced in this chapter in the context of telecommunication. The adverse effects on speech caused by reverberation are problematic, in particular, in hands-free terminals operating typically at arms-length from the talker’s lips. This introductory chapter will provide a system description of room reverberation and will formulate mathematically the dereverberation problem in its most direct form so as to introduce and underpin the more detailed presentation in subsequent chapters. Elements of room acoustics will also be introduced where needed, though detailed study of acoustics is not the aim of this text.
At the time of writing this, dereverberation is a topic of study with many important research questions remaining as yet unanswered. Whilst reviewing the relevant literature later in this chapter, it is intended both to describe the state-of-the-art and to highlight some of the significant open issues. Whereas the former aims to consolidate, perhaps for the first time, the known achievements to date of the research community, the latter aims to highlight potential avenues of future research.
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Naylor, P., Gaubitch, N. (2010). Introduction. In: Naylor, P., Gaubitch, N. (eds) Speech Dereverberation. Signals and Commmunication Technology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-056-4_1
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