Speech enhancement using an Improved MMSE estimator with Laplacian prior

In this paper we present an optimal estimator of magnitude spectrum for speech enhancement when the clean speech DFT coefficients are modeled by a Laplacian distribution and the noise DFT coefficients are modeled by a Gaussian distribution. Chen has already introduced a Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimator of the magnitude spectrum. However, the proposed estimator, namely LapMMSE, does not have a closed form and is computationally extensive. We use his formulation for the MMSE estimator, employ some approximations and propose a computationally effective estimator for the magnitude spectrum. Experimental studies demonstrate better performance of our proposed estimator, Improved LapMMSE (ImpLapMMSE) Compared to LapMMSE and previous estimators in which Laplacian and Gaussian assumptions were made.