Single Channel Speech Enhancement

Speech is an elementary source of human interaction. The quality and intelligibility of speech signals during communication are generally degraded by the surrounding noise. Corrupted speech signals need therefore to be enhanced to improve quality and intelligibility. This book focuses on a single channel speech enhancement technique that performs noise reduction by spectral subtraction based on minimum statistics. Minimum statistics means that the power spectrum of the non-stationary noise signal is estimated by finding the minimum values of a smoothed power spectrum of the noisy speech signal and, thus, circumvents the speech activity detection problem. The performance of the spectral subtraction method is evaluated using single channel speech data and for a wide range of noise types with various noise levels. This evaluation is used in order to find optimum method parameter values, thereby improving this algorithm to make it more appropriate for speech communication purposes. This book is essential for those people who want to learn about speech enhancement in a single channel, and the analysis of this book must be useful for professionals in the field of speech communication.