A speech enhancement algorithm to reduce noise and compensate for partial masking effect

Abstract

To enhance the speech quality that is degraded by environmental noise, an algorithm was proposed to reduce the noise and reinforce the speech. The minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) algorithm was used to estimate the noise spectrum and the partial masking effect which is one of the psychoacoustic properties was introduced to reinforce speech. The performance evaluation was performed by comparing the PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) and segSNR (segmental signal to noise ratio) by the proposed algorithm with the conventional algorithm. As a result, average PESQ by the proposed algorithm was higher than the average PESQ by the conventional noise reduction algorithm and segSNR was higher as much as 3.2 dB in average than that of the noise reduction algorithm.

Keywords

speech enhancement / noise reduction / psychoacoustic property / human hearing property