Noise Power Spectral Density Estimation for Public Address Systems in Noisy Reverberant Environments
Neda Faraji, Richard Christian Hendriks · 2012
In many public areas, public address systems play a central role in broadcasting important messages. Consider e.g., air-ports or train stations. The intelligibility of messages broad-cast by such public address systems gets reduced due to en-vironmental noise sources. Usually, these systems therefore employ a pre-processing module to modify the original mes-sage such that its intelligibility in the noisy environment is increased. Most of the pre-processing methods for intelli-gibility improvement require an estimate of the environmen-tal noise PSD. However, existing noise PSD estimators over-estimate the noise PSD in reverberant environments, leading to an overamplification of the speech by the speech intelli-gibility pre-processing module. In this paper, we propose a new MMSE-based noise PSD estimator that can be utilized in public address systems considering reverberation. Index Terms — Noise PSD tracking, Public address sys-tem, Reverberation 1.