Subband particle filtering for speech enhancement

Journal ArticleABSTRACT Particle filters have recently been applied to speech enhancement when the input speech signal is modeled as a time-varying autoregressive process with stochastically evolving parameters. This type of modeling results in a nonlinear and conditionally Gaussian statespace system that is not amenable to analytical solutions. Prior work in this area involved signal processing in the fullband domain and assumed white Gaussian noise with known variance. This paper extends such ideas to subband domain particle filters and colored noise. Experimental results indicate that the subband particle filter achieves higher segmental SNR than the fullband algorithm and is effective in dealing with colored noise without increasing the computational complexity

Reconstruction-based speech enhancement from robust acoustic features

This paper proposes a method of speech enhancement where a clean speech signal is reconstructed from a sinusoidal model of speech production and a set of acoustic speech features. The acoustic features are estimated from noisy speech and comprise, for each frame, a voicing classification (voiced, unvoiced or non-speech), fundamental frequency (for voiced frames) and spectral envelope. Rather than using different algorithms to estimate each parameter, a single statistical model is developed. This comprises a set of acoustic models and has similarity to the acoustic modelling used in speech recognition. This allows noise and speaker adaptation to be applied to acoustic feature estimation to improve robustness. Objective and subjective tests compare reconstruction-based enhancement with other methods of enhancement and show the proposed method to be highly effective at removing noise

HMM-Based Speech Enhancement Using Sub-Word Models and Noise Adaptation

This work proposes a method of speech enhancement that uses a network of HMMs to first decode noisy speech and to then synthesise a set of features that enables a clean speech signal to be reconstructed. Different choices of acoustic model (whole-word, monophone and triphone) and grammars (highly constrained to no constraints) are considered and the effects of introducing or relaxing acoustic and grammar constraints investigated. For robust operation in noisy conditions it is necessary for the HMMs to model noisy speech and consequently noise adaptation is investigated along with its effect on the reconstructed speech. Speech quality and intelligibility analysis find triphone models with no grammar, combined with noise adaptation, gives highest performance that outperforms conventional methods of enhancement at low signal-to-noise ratios