Multi-channel psychoacoustically motivated speech enhancement

Multichannel techniques offer advantages in noise reduction and overall output signal quality when compared to the well studied mono approaches. In this paper we present an original multichannel psychoacoustically motivates noise reduction algorithm that naturally extends the single channel psychoacoustic masking filter previously studied in the literature [S. Gustafsson et al., 1999]. The optimality criterion is designed to simultaneously satisfy the psychoacoustic masking principle and minimize the signal total distortion. In experiments on real data recorded in a noisy car environment, we show the enhanced performance of the two-channel solution in terms of artifacts and overall tradeoff between artifacts and amount of noise removed as given by word recognition rates.