A method of wall absorption treatment for enhancing the speech intelligibility at a directional microphone array in a room

Abstract

Wall absorption treatment effectively reduces reverberation, but requires a large area for a live room and each wall absorption affects speech intelligibility differently. In this study, we try to find the most effective wall for the absorption treatment using the beamforming array microphone in terms of speech intelligibility. The absorption importance factor is defined by using the collision number of reflected sounds on each wall. It allows estimating how much the speech signal will be enhanced by the absorption treatment. A cuboid room with a size of 107 m3 and a reverberation time of 1.1 s is selected for the simulation. When a Helmholtz-type absorption is treated on the wall with the most significant importance factor, the modified clarity for 500 and 1k Hz is improved by 5.1 dB and 4.8 dB respectively, and the speech transmission index is enhanced by 0.06. The difference in results between the proposed method and commercial simulation code is less than a Just-Noticeable Difference (JND). The absorption treatment on the wall with the most significant importance factor shows improvement greater than the wall with the largest area, and its difference is larger than a JND value.