Incorporating a psychoacoustical model in frequency domain speech enhancement

A frequency domain optimal linear estimator is proposed which incorporates the masking properties of the human auditory system to make the residual noise distortion inaudible. The use of wavelet-thresholded multitaper spectra is also proposed for frequency-domain speech enhancement methods as an alternative to the traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based magnitude spectra. Experiments with multitalker babble noise indicated that the proposed estimator outperformed the minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude estimator (MMSE-LSA), particularly when wavelet-thresholded multitaper spectra were used in place of the FFT spectra.