A Robust Noise Spectral Estimation Algorithm for Speech Enhancement in Voice Devices

In this thesis, a new robust noise spectral estimation algorithm is proposed for the purpose of single-microphone speech enhancement. This algorithm can generate the optimal noise spectral estimates in the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) sense based on the speech statistics in the noisy environments. Compared to the well-adopted conventional noise spectral estimation method using the single-pole recursion, our proposed scheme is more reliable since the recursion coefficients are adaptable and optimal in the MMSE therein. We also propose a new accurate Resulting Signal-to-Noise Ratio (R-SNR) estimator as a quality measure to benchmark the existing noise spectral estimation techniques. This new R-SNR estimator can be applied to quantify not only the residual noise but also the speech distortion and therefore it can well serve as the overall speech quality measure after the noise suppression. We conduct the experiments to evaluate the performance of the noise suppression using our robust noise spectral estimation algorithm and compare it with those of two major existing noise spectral estimation methods. Through numerous simulations, we have shown that our noise suppression technique significantly outperforms the conventional methods in both stationary and nonstationary noise environments