Raking early reflection signals for late reverberation and noise reduction

In acoustic environments the microphones capture a source signal corrupted by room reverberation and noise. This letter presents two optimum spatial filters which jointly reduce late reverberation and noise for the sound source recorded from distance in a reverberant room. The proposed rake filters are derived by incorporating spatial information about early reflection paths into the multichannel filter design. The results of performed numerical and real experiments indicate that the proposed rake filtering improves the reduction of detrimental late reverberation and noise, and increases the perceptual quality of the recorded speech.