  The estimation of the decay rate of a signal section is an integral component
of both blind and non-blind reverberation time estimation methods. Several
decay rate estimators have previously been proposed, based on, e.g., linear
regression and maximum-likelihood estimation. Unfortunately, most approaches
are sensitive to background noise, and/or are fairly demanding in terms of
computational complexity. This paper presents a low complexity decay rate
estimator, robust to stationary noise, for reverberation time estimation.
Simulations using artificial signals, and experiments with speech in
ventilation noise, demonstrate the performance and noise robustness of the
proposed method.
