DNN-Based Speech Re-Reverb for VR Rooms

Reverberation is a physical phenomena caused by room impulse reflection from walls, ceilings and other plane surfaces. When occurring in speech, it contributes an additive echo to the speech which is proportional to the geometry of the environment in which that speech was recorded. Reverberation is not just noise though, as the echo timing in speech affects its intelligibility as well as the listener's interpretation of the playback environment. It gives listeners a sense of the size, shape and materials of the room it is in. For communications scenarios where playback reverberation differs significantly from the visual display (e.g. speech recorded in a small room but played back in a cavernous virtual reality (VR) space), a psychoacoustic dissonance arises between visual and auditory perception. This paper presents an AI-based algorithm to remove source room reverberation impulse effects from speech. We then add reverberation to match the target playback environment. To assess effectiveness, we simulate a set of recording room geometries, and perform psychoacoustic assessment to estimate the effect on a human listener.