Speech enhancement based conceptually on auditory evidence

A new idea, enhancing speech based on auditory evidence, is explored for the problem of enhancing speech degraded by stationary and nonstationary additive white noise. Distinguishing different objectives for heavy and light noise interference, two related algorithms are developed. For speech degraded by heavy noise, the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is as high as 12 dB; for lightly noisy speech, the improvement is modest and decreases as the SNR of the noisy speech increases. Quantizing noise is used to assess the capacity for reducing nonstationary noise using these algorithms; a significant reduction of such noise and an improvement in speech quality are achieved. The advantages of the proposed algorithms for speech enhancement include no need for prior knowledge of the noise and only a modest computational requirement