Single-Channel Blind Direct-to-Reverberation Ratio Estimation Using Masking

Acoustic parameters, like the direct-to-reverberation ratio (DRR), can be used in audio processing algorithms to perform, e.g., dereverberation or in audio augmented reality. Often, the DRR is not available and has to be estimated blindly from recorded audio signals. State-of-the-art DRR estimation is achieved by deep neural networks (DNNs), which directly map a feature representation of the acquired signals to the DRR. Motivated by the equality of the signal-to-reverberation ratio and the (channel-based) DRR under certain conditions, we formulate single-channel DRR estimation as an extraction task of two signal components from the recorded audio. The DRR can be obtained by inserting the estimated signals in the definition of the DRR. The extraction is performed using time-frequency masks. The masks are estimated by a DNN trained end-to-end to minimize the mean-squared error between the estimated and the oracle DRR. We conduct experiments with different pre-processing and mask estimation schemes. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single- and multi-channel methods on the ACE challenge data corpus.