Low-frequency band noise suppression using bone conducted speech

This paper proposes a technique for suppressing low-frequency band noise from speech signal. In practice, speech is often corrupted by color noise like car and multi-talker babble noise that affect mostly the low-frequency region of speech signal. We propose a straightforward approach for noise reduction by utilizing bone conducted (BC) speech. Lower frequency region of BC speech is completely intelligible and it is well known for its robustness against ambient noise. When the normal air conducted (AC) speech gets corrupted by low-frequency band noise, it can be readily suppressed by replacing the lower frequency region of noisy AC speech by the same from BC speech. Since the proposed method does not require noise estimation, it is thus possible to avoid distortion introduced due to imperfect noise estimation by the traditional enhancement techniques. Evaluation results show that the method can be effectively used for suppressing low-frequency band noise even at low SNRs.