Multi-channel psychoacoustically motivated speech enhancement

Multi-channel techniques offer advantages in noise reduction and overall output signal quality when compared to the well studied mono approaches. We present an original multi-channel psychoacoustically motivated noise reduction algorithm that naturally extends the single channel psychoacoustic masking filter previously studied (see Gustafsson, S. et al., ICASSP, p.873-6, 1999). The optimality criterion is designed to satisfy the psychoacoustic masking principle and to minimize the signal total distortion simultaneously. In experiments on real data recorded in a noisy car environment, we show the enhanced performance of the two-channel solution in terms of artifacts and overall tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of noise removed as given by word recognition rates.