Speech enhancement based on audible noise suppression

Abstract

A novel speech enhancement technique is presented based on the definition of the psychoacoustically derived quantity of audible noise spectrum and its subsequent suppression using optimal nonlinear filtering of the short-time spectral amplitude (STSA) envelope. The filter operates with sparse spectral estimates obtained from the STSA, and, when these parameters are accurately known, significant intelligibility gains, up to 40%, result in the processed speech signal. These parameters can be also estimated from noisy data, resulting into smaller but significant intelligibility gains.