Maximum Likelihood PSD Estimation for Speech Enhancement in Reverberation and Noise

In this contribution, we focus on the problem of power spectral density (PSD) estimation from multiple microphone signals in reverberant and noisy environments. The PSD estimation method proposed in this paper is based on the maximum likelihood (ML) methodology. In particular, we derive a novel ML PSD estimation scheme that is suitable for sound scenes which besides speech and reverberation consists of an additional noise component whose second-order statistics are known. The proposed algorithm is shown to outperform an existing similar algorithm in terms of PSD estimation accuracy. Moreover, it is shown numerically that the mean-squared estimation error achieved by the proposed method is near the limit set by the corresponding Cramér-Rao lower bound. The speech dereverberation performance of a multichannel Wiener filter based on the proposed PSD estimators is measured using several instrumental measures and is shown to be higher than when the competing estimator is used. Moreover, we perform a speech intelligibility test where we demonstrate that both the proposed and the competing PSD estimators lead to similar intelligibility improvements.