Speech enhancement based on a combined spectral subtraction with spectral estimation in various noise environment

In this paper, some classical and modern spectral estimation algorithms are incorporated in the conventional spectral subtraction method for improving the performance of speech enhancement. There are three methods are proposed in this paper: the SSW method, the SSY method and the SSM method. Some typical environment noise signals are chosen from the common noise group. The noisy speech signals adopted in the experiments are the clean speech contaminated by the additive noise and the convolution noise at different signal-to-noise ratios respectively. The Itakura-Saito spectrum distance between the enhanced speech and the clean speech is served as the measurement of the quality of the speech enhancement system. Each type of the noisy speech signals will be enhanced by the conventional spectrum subtraction method and the three proposed methods respectively. Experimental results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed methods over the conventional spectrum subtraction method. It is concluded that each of them is adept to manipulating different type of noises according to the corresponding characteristics.