Trade-off evaluation for speech enhancement algorithms with respect to the a priori SNR estimation

In this paper, a modified a priori SNR estimator is proposed for speech enhancement. The well-known decision-directed (DD) approach is modified by matching each gain function with the noisy speech spectrum at current frame rather than the previous one. The proposed algorithm eliminates the speech transient distortion and reduces the impact from the choice of the gain function towards the level of smoothing in the SNR estimate. An objective evaluation metric is employed to measure the trade-off between musical noise, noise reduction and speech distortion. Performance is evaluated and compared between a modified sigmoid gain function, the state-of-the-art log-spectral amplitude estimator and the Wiener filter. Simulation results show that the modified DD approach performs better in terms of the trade-off evaluation.