A LSA-MMSE Speech Enhancement Approach Incorporating Masking Properties

To improve the effect of single channel speech enhancement at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), this paper proposed a optimal speech enhancement scheme. Based on auditory masking effects, the speech spectra estimation is performed in two cases: noisy speech spectra for noise masked and classical spectral subtraction estimate for noise unmasked. Then a speech signal estimator is proposed as a weighted sum of the individual estimator in each state. Compared with Virag´s method and LSA-MMSE estimator, the proposed estimator can suppress the residual noise effectively while keep smaller speech distortion especially at low SNR