Speech/noise-dominant decision for speech enhancement

A novel method to reduce additive non-stationary noise is proposed. The proposed method requires neither the statistical assumption about noise nor the estimate of the noise statistics from any pause regions. The enhancement is performed on a band-by-band basis for each time frame. Based on both the decision on whether a particular band in a frame is speech or noise dominant and the masking property of the human auditory system, an appropriate amount of noise is reduced using modified spectral subtraction. The proposed method was tested on various noisy conditions car noise, F16 noise, white Gaussian noise, pink noise, tank noise and babble noise. On the basis of comparing segmental SNR with spectral subtraction proposed by Boll with pause detection for estimating noise, and visually inspecting the enhanced spectrograms and listening to the enhanced speech, the proposed method was found to effectively reduce various noise while minimizing distortion to speech.