Enhancing Speech by Reconstruction from Robust Acoustic Features

A method of speech enhancement is developed that reconstructs clean speech from a set of acoustic features using a sinusoidal model of speech. This is a significant departure from traditional filtering-based methods of speech enhancement. A major challenge with this approach is to estimate accurately the acoustic features (voicing, fundamental frequency, spectral envelope) from noisy speech. This is achieved using maximum a-posteriori estimation methods that operate on the noisy speech. Objective results are presented to optimise the proposed system and a set of subjective tests compare the approach with traditional enhancement methods.