Blind binary masking for reverberation suppression in cochlear implants

A monaural binary time-frequency (T-F) masking technique is proposed for suppressing reverberation. The mask is estimated for each T-F unit by extracting a variance-based feature from the reverberant signal and comparing it against an adaptive threshold. Performance of the estimated binary mask is evaluated in three moderate to relatively high reverberant conditions (T60 = 0.3, 0.6, and 0.8 s) using intelligibility listening tests with cochlear implant users. Results indicate that the proposed T-F masking technique yields significant improvements in intelligibility of reverberant speech even in relatively high reverberant conditions (T60 = 0.8 s). The improvement is hypothesized to result from the recovery of the vowel/consonant boundaries, which are severely smeared in reverberation. (C) 2013 Acoustical Society of America. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4789891]