Ideal neighbourhood mask for speech enhancement

A novel approach for speech enhancement applications by applying spectral mask estimation is introduced. The new application uses the local binary patterns to estimate an ideal neighbourhood mask. This will indicate which time–frequency units of the noisy speech are dominated by the noise. The performance assessment of the proposed application in conjunction with the traditional mask techniques, i.e. ideal binary mask and ideal ratio mask, are carried out under various environments in terms of the objective speech quality measures, as well as word error rate performance in speech recognition systems using deep neural networks. Results indicated that the proposed mask yielded significantly better performance than the conventional techniques.