A perceptually balanced loss function for short-time spectral amplitude estimation

Here we present a novel approach to audio signal enhancement based on psychoacoustic principles. Specifically, we describe a short-time spectral amplitude estimator whose form comprises a weighted sum of the minimum mean-square error solution and the observed spectral value, where the weighting factor is given by the ratio of the masked threshold and this observed value. We then explore the connection between our approach and the idea of socalled balanced loss functions in statistics, showing the former to be an instance of the latter with a very special choice of weighting factor. Lastly, we present results indicating the relative merits of our approach in both objective and subjective terms, as compared to standard minimum mean-square error estimation under the assumed model. Software and sound examples are available at http://www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pjw47.