Joint time-domain reshaping and frequency-domain equalization of room impulse responses

In listening room compensation, the aim is to compensate for the degradations that are rendered to an audio signal by transmission in a closed room. Due to multiple reflections of the soundwaves, the listener receives a superposition of delayed and attenuated versions of the source signal. A filter is designed so that the convolution of the room impulse response and the equalizer contains better acoustic properties than the original acoustic channel. Common approaches for derever-beration optimize only the time-domain representation of the overall impulse response and may introduce distortions in the frequency domain. Equalization of the frequency response, on the other hand, often does not consider the time-domain behavior in an ideal way. In this paper, we propose a novel method to jointly consider both the time- and frequency-domain behavior. It outperforms the methods known from literature in terms of dereverberation and equalization performance. Results are presented for a room impulse response measured in a real living room.