  The advance of technology for transmitting Data-over-Sound in various IoT and
telecommunication applications has led to the concept of machine-to-machine
over-the-air acoustic signalling. Reverberation can have a detrimental effect
on such machine-to-machine signals while decoding. Various methods have been
studied to combat the effects of reverberation in speech and audio signals, but
it is not clear how well they generalise to other sound types. We look at
extending these models to facilitate machine-to-machine acoustic signalling.
This research investigates dereverberation techniques to shortlist a
single-channel reverberation suppression method through a pilot test. In order
to apply the chosen dereverberation method a novel method of estimating
acoustic parameters governing reverberation is proposed. The performance of the
final algorithm is evaluated on quality metrics as well as the performance of a
real machine-to-machine decoder. We demonstrate a dramatic reduction in error
rate for both audible and ultrasonic signals.
