An improved perceptual speech enhancement technique employing a psychoacoustically motivated weighting factor

Suppression of speech components after perceptual speech enhancement (SE) lowers the noise masking threshold (NMT) level of the enhanced signal. This may re-introduce noise components that are initially masked but not processed by the denoising filter, thereby, favoring the emergence of musical noise. This paper presents a modified perceptual speech enhancement algorithm based on a perceptually motivated weighting factor to effectively suppress the background noise without introducing much distortion in the enhanced signal using the perceptual speech enhancement methods. The performance of the proposed enhancement algorithm is evaluated by the Segmental SNR and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) measures under various noisy environments and yields better results compared to the perceptual speech enhancement methods.