Impact noise suppression using spectral phase estimation

In impact noise suppression, only a perfect estimation of the speech spectral amplitude does not perfectly suppress the impact noise because of remain of the noisy phase which is a linear phase. The remained linear phase may cause another impulsive noise. This paper proposes a speech spectral phase estimator for impact noise suppression. Under the assumption that an impact noise can be modeled as a symmetrical signal, i.e., its spectral phase has a linear characteristics, we obtain the speech spectral phase by removing the linear characteristics from the noisy spectral phase. The spectral phase estimator is combined with a conventional spectral amplitude estimator established in zero phase domain. Evaluation results showed that the proposed method improved 2 dB in SNR, 0.2 points in PESQ, and 0.05 points in STOI in comparison to the conventional impact noise suppressors.