An Improved Multi-band Speech Enhancement Method for Colored Noise Estimation and Reduction
Radu Mihnea Udrea, Dragoş Nicolae Vizireanu, Claudia Cristina Oprea, Ionuţ Pirnog · 2010
Abstract—There are many situations where speech is affected by different kind of acoustic noise. We propose an improved spectral subtraction method for the reduction of colored acoustic noise added to the speech. Our implementation uses a multi-band spectral over subtraction method to reduce the colored noise. We use a non-linear Bark scale distribution to estimate the over-subtraction factor. The noise power spectral density is estimated, using a time-recursive algorithm, by tracking the minimum of the noisy speech spectrum in each frequency band. Simulations show a better quality in terms of Itakura Saito distance and perceptual evaluation of quality for the enhanced speech. Using the proposed speech enhancement method, a very good speech quality with less musical noise and with minimal speech distortion is obtained. Keywords-speech enhancement; spectral subtraction; noise estimation; critical band. I.