Speech enhancement using temporal masking in presence of near-end noise

In mobile phones, perceived speech signals deteriorates significantly in the presence of background noise as it arrives at the near-end listener´s ears. There is an inherent need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by developing speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on the speech enhancement method by incorporating temporal masking properties of the human ear. The gain adjustment process employing both pre- and post-masking are adopted to improve the intelligibility and quality of the speech signal This is implemented by automatically enhancing the speech signal when the noise is dominant. The intelligibility and quality of the speech signal are measured using SII and PESQ respectively. Experimental results show improvement in the intelligibility and quality of the speech signal with the proposed method over unprocessed far-end speech signal The proposed approach is efficient in overcoming the degradation of speech signals in the presence of background noise.