Uncertainties of reverberation time estimation via adaptively identified room impulse responses

This paper investigates the reverberation time estimation methods which employ backward integration of adaptively identified room impulse responses (RIRs). Two kinds of conditions are considered; the first is the "ideal condition" where the anechoic and reverberant signals are both known a priori so that the RIRs can be identified using system identification methods. The second is that only the reverberant speech signal is available, and blind identification of the RIRs via dereverberation is employed for reverberation time estimation. Results show that under the "ideal condition," the average relative errors in 7 octave bands are less than 2% for white noise and 15% for speech, respectively, when both the anechoic and reverberant signals are available. In contrast, under the second condition, the average relative errors of the blindly identified RIR-based reverberation time estimation are around 20%-30% except the 63 Hz octave band. The fluctuation of reverberation times estimated under the second condition is more severe than that under the ideal condition and the relative error for low frequency octave bands is larger than that for high octave bands under both conditions.