In this paper, we propose a full-reference objective quality evaluation method for noise-reduced speech. In the proposed method, acoustical features are extracted from input noisereduced speech and its original clean version, and then the speech quality and the noise quality are estimated separately from these features. Finally, the overall quality is determined from the estimates of the speech...

Performances of speech enhancement algorithms depend greatly on the accuracy of the estimated noise. In this paper, we explain in details the relationship between noise estimation and denoised speech quality. Firstly, the effect of silence length on noise estimation is analyzed. We particularly show the importance of noise smoothing over frames on denoising quality. This study leads to the deve...

Modern speech coding schemes have been developed to address the demand for economical spoken language telecommunication of acceptable quality. A variety of speech coding algorithms have been described, which compress speech to facilitate efficient transmission of spoken language over communication networks [2,3,4]. Most such speech coding algorithms are lossy in the sense that the “processed” s...

One problem with speech recognition is a low performance in noisy environments because it is easily influenced by aerial in air. Although the sound quality of body-conducted speech (BCS) and regular speech are different, with BCS recognition, it is possible to recognize an utterance in noisy environments with a rating of 98 dB sound pressure level (SPL) in our previous study. In this study, we ...

Speech captured from an in-ear microphone (IEM) under an intra-aural device is beneficial in extremely noisy environments as it maintains a relatively high signal to noise ratio. Due to its limited bandwidth, speech enhancement is required in order to obtain a more natural speech. Consequently, quick and practical measurement of speech quality is important. In this paper, we compare the perform...

HMM-based speech synthesis offers a way to generate speech with different voice qualities. However, sometimes databases contain certain inherent voice qualities that need to be parametrized properly. One example of this is vocal fry typically occurring at the end of utterances. A popular mixed excitation vocoder for HMM-based speech synthesis is STRAIGHT. The standard STRAIGHT is optimized for ...

Research has shown that degrading acoustic background noise innuences speech quality across phoneme classes in a non-uniform manner. This results in variable quality performance of many speech enhancement algorithms in noisy environments. A phoneme classiication procedure is proposed which directs single-channel constrained speech enhancement. The procedure performs broad phoneme class partitio...

Unit selection based concatenative speech synthesis has proven to be a successful method of producing high quality speech output. However, in order to produce high quality speech, large speech databases are required. For some applications, this is not practical due to the complexity of the database search process and the storage requirements of such databases. In this paper, we propose a data-d...

To better integrate disabled persons is a continuous aim in a modern society. For handicapped people, robots are used to support the personal freedom and provide more convenience. These robots need to be controlled by voice which requires a reliable working speech recognition system. Therefore, algorithms that can improve the quality of speech and thus support the detection of the speech inform...

In the modulation-filtering based speech enhancement method, noise suppression is achieved by bandpass filtering the temporal trajectories of the power spectrum. In the literature, some authors use the power spectrum directly for modulation filtering, while others use different compression functions for reducing the dynamic range of the power spectrum prior to its modulation filtering. This pap...