Using power level difference for near field dual-microphone speech enhancement

In this contribution, a novel dual-channel speech enhancement technique is introduced. The proposed approach uses the dissimilarity between the power of received signals in the two channels as a criterion for speech enhancement and noise reduction. We claim that in near field conditions, where the distances between microphones and sound source are short, the difference in the received power levels at the two microphones is an estimate of the clean speech signal power. Then, apply this theory to present an optimum method for speech enhancement. Fortunately, the method has the ability to cope with problems such as transient noise and nearby microphones which are two of the main problems of the proposed dual-microphone speech enhancement techniques. Using objective speech quality measures and spectrogram analysis, we show that the proposed method results in improved speech quality.