In this paper, a speech enhancement algorithm is proposed to improve the speech intelligibility for cochlear implant recipients. Our method is based on combination of harmonic estimation and traditional statistical method. Traditional statistical based speech enhancement method is effective only for stationary noise suppression, but not non-stationary noise. To address more complex noise scenar...

Seeing the talker improves the intelligibility of speech degraded by noise (a visual speech enhancement effect). This experiment examined whether this enhancement is greater when the speech signals were recorded in noise compared to when they were recorded in quiet. Ten sentences were spoken by four people either in-quiet or whilst they were listening to cocktail party noise (in-noise). The vis...

In many cases the intelligibility of speech in noise may be assumed independent of the absolute sound level; the speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) primarily determines intelligibility. However, at high sound levels, speech intelligibility is found to decrease. Subjective Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) measurements were performed at various speech and noise levels, and with various noise spectra. De...

When exposed to noise, speakers modify the way they speak, possibly in an effort to maintain intelligible communication. These modifications are collectively referred to as the Lombard effect. The work described in this thesis compares speech production changes induced by noise with various spectral and temporal characteristics, and explores the perceptual consequence of these changes. The thes...

This paper describes a technique for reduction of non-stationary noise in electronic voice communication systems. Removal of noise is needed in many such systems, particularly those deployed in harsh mobile or otherwise dynamic acoustic environments. The proposed method employs state-based statistical models of both speech and noise, and is thus capable of tracking variations in noise during su...

Assessing the intelligibility of synthetic speech is important in creating synthetic voices to be used in real life applications, especially for the ones involving interfering noise. This raises the question how to measure the intelligibility of synthetic speech to correctly simulate such conditions. Conventionally, this has been done using a simple listening test setup where diotic speech and ...

Voice activity detection (VAD) is mainly used to detect speech/non-speech periods in observed noisy signals. The detected periods are used to reduce noise components or enhance speech components in noisy speech. However, current VAD techniques have serious problems in that the accuracy of detection of speech/non-speech periods drastically reduces if they are used for noisy speech and/or for mix...

Speech enhancement algorithms have been employed successfully in many areas such as VoIP, automatic speech recognition and speaker verification. Some of the methods assume that the environmental noise is white noise. However, when used in colored noise environments, those methods will produce a weaker performance. Approaches for colored noise have also been previously proposed, however those pr...