A perceptually motivated approach for speech enhancement

Abstract

A new perceptually motivated approach is proposed for enhancement of speech corrupted by colored noise. The proposed approach takes into account the frequency masking properties of the human auditory system and reduces the perceptual effect of the residual noise. This new perceptual method is incorporated into a frequency-domain speech enhancement method and a subspace-based speech enhancement method. A better power spectrum/autocorrelation function estimator was also developed to improve the performance of the proposed algorithms. Objective measures and informal listening tests demonstrated significant improvements over other methods when tested with TIMIT sentences corrupted by various types of colored noise.