Instantaneous PSD Estimation for Speech Enhancement based on Generalized Principal Components

Power spectral density (PSD) estimates of various microphone signal components are essential to many speech enhancement procedures. As speech is highly non-nonstationary, performance improvements may be gained by maintaining time-variations in PSD estimates. In this paper, we propose an instantaneous PSD estimation approach based on generalized principal components. Similarly to other eigenspace-based PSD estimation approaches, we rely on recursive averaging in order to obtain a microphone signal correlation matrix estimate to be decomposed. However, instead of estimating the PSDs directly from the temporally smooth generalized eigenvalues of this matrix, yielding temporally smooth PSD estimates, we propose to estimate the PSDs from newly defined instantaneous generalized eigenvalues, yielding instantaneous PSD estimates. The instantaneous generalized eigenvalues are defined from the generalized principal components, i.e. a generalized eigenvector-based transform of the microphone signals. We further show that the smooth generalized eigenvalues can be understood as a recursive average of the instantaneous generalized eigenvalues. Simulation results comparing the multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) with smooth and instantaneous PSD estimates indicate better speech enhancement performance for the latter. A MATLAB implementation is available online

Enhancing dysarthria speech feature representation with empirical mode decomposition and Walsh-Hadamard transform

Dysarthria speech contains the pathological characteristics of vocal tract and vocal fold, but so far, they have not yet been included in traditional acoustic feature sets. Moreover, the nonlinearity and non-stationarity of speech have been ignored. In this paper, we propose a feature enhancement algorithm for dysarthria speech called WHFEMD. It combines empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT) to enhance features. With the proposed algorithm, the fast Fourier transform of the dysarthria speech is first performed and then followed by EMD to get intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). After that, FWHT is used to output new coefficients and to extract statistical features based on IMFs, power spectral density, and enhanced gammatone frequency cepstral coefficients. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted experiments on two public pathological speech databases including UA Speech and TORGO. The results show that our algorithm performed better than traditional features in classification. We achieved improvements of 13.8% (UA Speech) and 3.84% (TORGO), respectively. Furthermore, the incorporation of an imbalanced classification algorithm to address data imbalance has resulted in a 12.18% increase in recognition accuracy. This algorithm effectively addresses the challenges of the imbalanced dataset and non-linearity in dysarthric speech and simultaneously provides a robust representation of the local pathological features of the vocal folds and tracts

Single- and multi-microphone speech dereverberation using spectral enhancement

In speech communication systems, such as voice-controlled systems, hands-free mobile telephones, and hearing aids, the received microphone signals are degraded by room reverberation, background noise, and other interferences. This signal degradation may lead to total unintelligibility of the speech and decreases the performance of automatic speech recognition systems. In the context of this work reverberation is the process of multi-path propagation of an acoustic sound from its source to one or more microphones. The received microphone signal generally consists of a direct sound, reflections that arrive shortly after the direct sound (commonly called early reverberation), and reflections that arrive after the early reverberation (commonly called late reverberation). Reverberant speech can be described as sounding distant with noticeable echo and colouration. These detrimental perceptual effects are primarily caused by late reverberation, and generally increase with increasing distance between the source and microphone. Conversely, early reverberations tend to improve the intelligibility of speech. In combination with the direct sound it is sometimes referred to as the early speech component. Reduction of the detrimental effects of reflections is evidently of considerable practical importance, and is the focus of this dissertation. More specifically the dissertation deals with dereverberation techniques, i.e., signal processing techniques to reduce the detrimental effects of reflections. In the dissertation, novel single- and multimicrophone speech dereverberation algorithms are developed that aim at the suppression of late reverberation, i.e., at estimation of the early speech component. This is done via so-called spectral enhancement techniques that require a specific measure of the late reverberant signal. This measure, called spectral variance, can be estimated directly from the received (possibly noisy) reverberant signal(s) using a statistical reverberation model and a limited amount of a priori knowledge about the acoustic channel(s) between the source and the microphone(s). In our work an existing single-channel statistical reverberation model serves as a starting point. The model is characterized by one parameter that depends on the acoustic characteristics of the environment. We show that the spectral variance estimator that is based on this model, can only be used when the source-microphone distance is larger than the so-called critical distance. This is, crudely speaking, the distance where the direct sound power is equal to the total reflective power. A generalization of the statistical reverberation model in which the direct sound is incorporated is developed. This model requires one additional parameter that is related to the ratio between the direct sound energy and the sound energy of all reflections. The generalized model is used to derive a novel spectral variance estimator. When the novel estimator is used for dereverberation rather than the existing estimator, and the source-microphone distance is smaller than the critical distance, the dereverberation performance is significantly increased. Single-microphone systems only exploit the temporal and spectral diversity of the received signal. Reverberation, of course, also induces spatial diversity. To additionally exploit this diversity, multiple microphones must be used, and their outputs must be combined by a suitable spatial processor such as the so-called delay and sum beamformer. It is not a priori evident whether spectral enhancement is best done before or after the spatial processor. For this reason we investigate both possibilities, as well as a merge of the spatial processor and the spectral enhancement technique. An advantage of the latter option is that the spectral variance estimator can be further improved. Our experiments show that the use of multiple microphones affords a significant improvement of the perceptual speech quality. The applicability of the theory developed in this dissertation is demonstrated using a hands-free communication system. Since hands-free systems are often used in a noisy and reverberant environment, the received microphone signal does not only contain the desired signal but also interferences such as room reverberation that is caused by the desired source, background noise, and a far-end echo signal that results from a sound that is produced by the loudspeaker. Usually an acoustic echo canceller is used to cancel the far-end echo. Additionally a post-processor is used to suppress background noise and residual echo, i.e., echo which could not be cancelled by the echo canceller. In this work a novel structure and post-processor for an acoustic echo canceller are developed. The post-processor suppresses late reverberation caused by the desired source, residual echo, and background noise. The late reverberation and late residual echo are estimated using the generalized statistical reverberation model. Experimental results convincingly demonstrate the benefits of the proposed system for suppressing late reverberation, residual echo and background noise. The proposed structure and post-processor have a low computational complexity, a highly modular structure, can be seamlessly integrated into existing hands-free communication systems, and affords a significant increase of the listening comfort and speech intelligibility

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

A compact noise covariance matrix model for MVDR beamforming

Acoustic beamforming is routinely used to improve the SNR of the received signal in applications such as hearing aids, robot audition, augmented reality, teleconferencing, source localisation and source tracking. The beamformer can be made adaptive by using an estimate of the time-varying noise covariance matrix in the spectral domain to determine an optimised beam pattern in each frequency bin that is specific to the acoustic environment and that can respond to temporal changes in it. However, robust estimation of the noise covariance matrix remains a challenging task especially in non-stationary acoustic environments. This paper presents a compact model of the signal covariance matrix that is defined by a small number of parameters whose values can be reliably estimated. The model leads to a robust estimate of the noise covariance matrix which can, in turn, be used to construct a beamformer. The performance of beamformers designed using this approach is evaluated for a spherical microphone array under a range of conditions using both simulated and measured room impulse responses. The proposed approach demonstrates consistent gains in intelligibility and perceptual quality metrics compared to the static and adaptive beamformers used as baselines

Polynomial eigenvalue decomposition for multichannel broadband signal processing

This article is devoted to the polynomial eigenvalue decomposition (PEVD) and its applications in broadband multichannel signal processing, motivated by the optimum solutions provided by the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) for the narrow-band case [1], [2]. In general, the successful techniques from narrowband problems can also be applied to broadband ones, leading to improved solutions. Multichannel broadband signals arise at the core of many essential commercial applications such as telecommunications, speech processing, healthcare monitoring, astronomy and seismic surveillance, and military technologies like radar, sonar and communications [3]. The success of these applications often depends on the performance of signal processing tasks, including data compression [4], source localization [5], channel coding [6], signal enhancement [7], beamforming [8], and source separation [9]. In most cases and for narrowband signals, performing an EVD is the key to the signal processing algorithm. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce PEVD as a novel mathematical technique suitable for many broadband signal processing applications

Speech enhancement algorithms for audiological applications

Texto en inglés y resumen en inglés y españolPremio Extraordinario de Doctorado de la UAH en el año académico 2013-2014La mejora de la calidad de la voz es un problema que, aunque ha sido abordado durante muchos años, aún sigue abierto. El creciente auge de aplicaciones tales como los sistemas manos libres o de reconocimiento de voz automático y las cada vez mayores exigencias de las personas con pérdidas auditivas han dado un impulso definitivo a este área de investigación. Esta tesis doctoral se centra en la mejora de la calidad de la voz en aplicaciones audiológicas. La mayoría del trabajo de investigación desarrollado en esta tesis está dirigido a la mejora de la inteligibilidad de la voz en audífonos digitales, teniendo en cuenta las limitaciones de este tipo de dispositivos. La combinación de técnicas de separación de fuentes y filtrado espacial con técnicas de aprendizaje automático y computación evolutiva ha originado novedosos e interesantes algoritmos que son incluidos en esta tesis. La tesis esta dividida en dos grandes bloques. El primer bloque contiene un estudio preliminar del problema y una exhaustiva revisión del estudio del arte sobre algoritmos de mejora de la calidad de la voz, que sirve para definir los objetivos de esta tesis. El segundo bloque contiene la descripción del trabajo de investigación realizado para cumplir los objetivos de la tesis, así como los experimentos y resultados obtenidos. En primer lugar, el problema de mejora de la calidad de la voz es descrito formalmente en el dominio tiempo-frecuencia. Los principales requerimientos y restricciones de los audífonos digitales son definidas. Tras describir el problema, una amplia revisión del estudio del arte ha sido elaborada. La revisión incluye algoritmos de mejora de la calidad de la voz mono-canal y multi-canal, considerando técnicas de reducción de ruido y técnicas de separación de fuentes. Además, la aplicación de estos algoritmos en audífonos digitales es evaluada. El primer problema abordado en la tesis es la separación de fuentes sonoras en mezclas infra-determinadas en el dominio tiempo-frecuencia, sin considerar ningún tipo de restricción computacional. El rendimiento del famoso algoritmo DUET, que consigue separar fuentes de voz con solo dos mezclas, ha sido evaluado en diversos escenarios, incluyendo mezclas lineales y binaurales no reverberantes, mezclas reverberantes, y mezclas de voz con otro tipo de fuentes tales como ruido y música. El estudio revela la falta de robustez del algoritmo DUET, cuyo rendimiento se ve seriamente disminuido en mezclas reverberantes, mezclas binaurales, y mezclas de voz con música y ruido. Con el objetivo de mejorar el rendimiento en estos casos, se presenta un novedoso algoritmo de separación de fuentes que combina la técnica de clustering mean shift con la base del algoritmo DUET. La etapa de clustering del algoritmo DUET, que esta basada en un histograma ponderado, es reemplazada por una modificación del algoritmo mean shift, introduciendo el uso de un kernel Gaussiano ponderado. El análisis de los resultados obtenidos muestran una clara mejora obtenida por el algoritmo propuesto en relación con el algoritmo DUET original y una modificación que usa k-means. Además, el algoritmo propuesto ha sido extendido para usar un array de micrófonos de cualquier tamaño y geometría. A continuación se ha abordado el problema de la enumeración de fuentes de voz, que esta relacionado con el problema de separación de fuentes. Se ha propuesto un novedoso algoritmo basado en un criterio de teoría de la información y en la estimación de los retardos relativos causados por las fuentes entre un par de micrófonos. El algoritmo ha obtenido excelente resultados y muestra robustez en la enumeración de mezclas no reverberantes de hasta 5 fuentes de voz. Además se demuestra la potencia del algoritmo para la enumeración de fuentes en mezclas reverberantes. El resto de la tesis esta centrada en audífonos digitales. El primer problema tratado es el de la mejora de la inteligibilidad de la voz en audífonos monoaurales. En primer lugar, se realiza un estudio de los recursos computacionales disponibles en audífonos digitales de ultima generación. Los resultados de este estudio se han utilizado para limitar el coste computacional de los algoritmos de mejora de la calidad de la voz para audífonos propuestos en esta tesis. Para resolver este primer problema se propone un algoritmo mono-canal de mejora de la calidad de la voz de bajo coste computacional. El objetivo es la estimación de una mascara tiempo-frecuencia continua para obtener el mayor parámetro PESQ de salida. El algoritmo combina una versión generalizada del estimador de mínimos cuadrados con un algoritmo de selección de características a medida, utilizando un novedoso conjunto de características. El algoritmo ha obtenido resultados excelentes incluso con baja relación señal a ruido. El siguiente problema abordado es el diseño de algoritmos de mejora de la calidad de la voz para audífonos binaurales comunicados de forma inalámbrica. Estos sistemas tienen un problema adicional, y es que la conexión inalámbrica aumenta el consumo de potencia. El objetivo en esta tesis es diseñar algoritmos de mejora de la calidad de la voz de bajo coste computacional que incrementen la eficiencia energética en audífonos binaurales comunicados de forma inalámbrica. Se han propuesto dos soluciones. La primera es un algoritmo de extremado bajo coste computacional que maximiza el parámetro WDO y esta basado en la estimación de una mascara binaria mediante un discriminante cuadrático que utiliza los valores ILD e ITD de cada punto tiempo-frecuencia para clasificarlo entre voz o ruido. El segundo algoritmo propuesto, también de bajo coste, utiliza además la información de puntos tiempo-frecuencia vecinos para estimar la IBM mediante una versión generalizada del LS-LDA. Además, se propone utilizar un MSE ponderado para estimar la IBM y maximizar el parámetro WDO al mismo tiempo. En ambos algoritmos se propone un esquema de transmisión eficiente energéticamente, que se basa en cuantificar los valores de amplitud y fase de cada banda de frecuencia con un numero distinto de bits. La distribución de bits entre frecuencias se optimiza mediante técnicas de computación evolutivas. El ultimo trabajo incluido en esta tesis trata del diseño de filtros espaciales para audífonos personalizados a una persona determinada. Los coeficientes del filtro pueden adaptarse a una persona siempre que se conozca su HRTF. Desafortunadamente, esta información no esta disponible cuando un paciente visita el audiólogo, lo que causa perdidas de ganancia y distorsiones. Con este problema en mente, se han propuesto tres métodos para diseñar filtros espaciales que maximicen la ganancia y minimicen las distorsiones medias para un conjunto de HRTFs de diseño

New Approaches for Speech Enhancement in the Short-Time Fourier Transform Domain

Speech enhancement aims at the improvement of speech quality by using various algorithms. A speech enhancement technique can be implemented as either a time domain or a transform domain method. In the transform domain speech enhancement, the spectrum of clean speech signal is estimated through the modification of noisy speech spectrum and then it is used to obtain the enhanced speech signal in the time domain. Among the existing transform domain methods in the literature, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) processing has particularly served as the basis to implement most of the frequency domain methods. In general, speech enhancement methods in the STFT domain can be categorized into the estimators of complex discrete Fourier transform (DFT) coefficients and the estimators of real-valued short-time spectral amplitude (STSA). Due to the computational efficiency of the STSA estimation method and also its superior performance in most cases, as compared to the estimators of complex DFT coefficients, we focus mostly on the estimation of speech STSA throughout this work and aim at developing algorithms for noise reduction and reverberation suppression. First, we tackle the problem of additive noise reduction using the single-channel Bayesian STSA estimation method. In this respect, we present new schemes for the selection of Bayesian cost function parameters for a parametric STSA estimator, namely the W�-SA estimator, based on an initial estimate of the speech and also the properties of human auditory system. We further use the latter information to design an efficient flooring scheme for the gain function of the STSA estimator. Next, we apply the generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) to theW�-SA estimator as the speech STSA prior and propose to choose its parameters according to noise spectral variance and a priori signal to noise ratio (SNR). The suggested STSA estimation schemes are able to provide further noise reduction as well as less speech distortion, as compared to the previous methods. Quality and noise reduction performance evaluations indicated the superiority of the proposed speech STSA estimation with respect to the previous estimators. Regarding the multi-channel counterpart of the STSA estimation method, first we generalize the proposed single-channel W�-SA estimator to the multi-channel case for spatially uncorrelated noise. It is shown that under the Bayesian framework, a straightforward extension from the single-channel to the multi-channel case can be performed by generalizing the STSA estimator parameters, i.e. � and �. Next, we develop Bayesian STSA estimators by taking advantage of speech spectral phase rather than only relying on the spectral amplitude of observations, in contrast to conventional methods. This contribution is presented for the multi-channel scenario with single-channel as a special case. Next, we aim at developing multi-channel STSA estimation under spatially correlated noise and derive a generic structure for the extension of a single-channel estimator to its multi-channel counterpart. It is shown that the derived multi-channel extension requires a proper estimate of the spatial correlation matrix of noise. Subsequently, we focus on the estimation of noise correlation matrix, that is not only important in the multi-channel STSA estimation scheme but also highly useful in different beamforming methods. Next, we aim at speech reverberation suppression in the STFT domain using the weighted prediction error (WPE) method. The original WPE method requires an estimate of the desired speech spectral variance along with reverberation prediction weights, leading to a sub-optimal strategy that alternatively estimates each of these two quantities. Also, similar to most other STFT based speech enhancement methods, the desired speech coefficients are assumed to be temporally independent, while this assumption is inaccurate. Taking these into account, first, we employ a suitable estimator for the speech spectral variance and integrate it into the estimation of the reverberation prediction weights. In addition to the performance advantage with respect to the previous versions of the WPE method, the presented approach provides a good reduction in implementation complexity. Next, we take into account the temporal correlation present in the STFT of the desired speech, namely the inter-frame correlation (IFC), and consider an approximate model where only the frames within each segment of speech are considered as correlated. Furthermore, an efficient method for the estimation of the underlying IFC matrix is developed based on the extension of the speech variance estimator proposed previously. The performance results reveal lower residual reverberation and higher overall quality provided by the proposed method. Finally, we focus on the problem of late reverberation suppression using the classic speech spectral enhancement method originally developed for additive noise reduction. As our main contribution, we propose a novel late reverberant spectral variance (LRSV) estimator which replaces the noise spectral variance in order to modify the gain function for reverberation suppression. The suggested approach employs a modified version of the WPE method in a model based smoothing scheme used for the estimation of the LRSV. According to the experiments, the proposed LRSV estimator outperforms the previous major methods considerably and scores the closest results to the theoretically true LRSV estimator. Particularly, in case of changing room impulse responses (RIRs) where other methods cannot follow the true LRSV estimator accurately, the suggested estimator is able to track true LRSV values and results in a smaller tracking error. We also target a few other aspects of the spectral enhancement method for reverberation suppression, which were explored before only for the purpose of noise reduction. These contributions include the estimation of signal to reverberant ratio (SRR) and the development of new schemes for the speech presence probability (SPP) and spectral gain flooring in the context of late reverberation suppression