A Perceptual Approach to Reduce Musical Noise Using Critical Bands Tonality Coefficients and Masking Thresholds

Traditional noise reduction techniques have the drawback of generating an annoying musical noise. A new scheme for speech enhancement in high noise environment is developed by considering human auditory system masking characteristics. The new scheme considers the masking threshold of both noisy speech and the denoised one, to detect musical noise components. To make them inaudible, they are set under the noise masking threshold. The improved signal is subjected to extensive subjective and objective tests. It is observed that the musical noise is appreciably reduced even at very low signal to noise ratios.