A Divide and Conquer Strategy for Musical Noise-free Speech Enhancement in Adverse Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel divide and conquer approach for noise-free speech enhancement in adverse environments, combining modified spectral subtraction and phase compensation to improve speech clarity at low SNR levels.

Contribution

It proposes a new two-step enhancement method that considers cross-terms in spectral subtraction and employs phase compensation based on speech presence probability.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in objective measures

Effective in very low and medium SNR conditions

Reduces musical noise in enhanced speech

Abstract

A divide and conquer strategy for enhancement of noisy speeches in adverse environments involving lower levels of SNR is presented in this paper, where the total system of speech enhancement is divided into two separate steps. The first step is based on noise compensation on short time magnitude and the second step is based on phase compensation. The magnitude spectrum is compensated based on a modified spectral subtraction method where the cross-terms containing spectra of noise and clean speech are taken into consideration, which are neglected in the traditional spectral subtraction methods. By employing the modified magnitude and unchanged phase, a procedure is formulated to compensate the overestimation or underestimation of noise by phase compensation method based on the probability of speech presence. A modified complex spectrum based on these two steps are obtained to synthesize a musical noise free enhanced speech. Extensive simulations are carried out using the speech files available in the NOIZEUS database in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. It is shown in terms of the objective measures, spectrogram analysis and formal subjective listening tests that the proposed method consistently outperforms some of the state-of-the-art methods of speech enhancement for noisy speech corrupted by street or babble noise at very low as well as medium levels of SNR.