An Adaptive Wavelet-Based Denoising Algorithm for Enhancing Speech in Non-stationary Noise Environment

Traditional wavelet-based speech enhancement algorithms are ineffective in the presence of highly non-stationary noise because of the difficulties in the accurate estimation of the local noise spectrum. In this paper, a simple method of noise estimation employing the use of a voice activity detector is proposed. We can improve the output of a wavelet-based speech enhancement algorithm in the presence of random noise bursts according to the results of VAD decision. The noisy speech is first preprocessed using bark-scale wavelet packet decomposition (BSWPD) to convert a noisy signal into wavelet coefficients (WCs). It is found that the VAD using bark-scale spectral entropy, called as BS-Entropy, parameter is superior to other energy-based approach especially in variable noise-level. The wavelet coefficient threshold (WCT) of each subband is then temporally adjusted according to the result of VAD approach. In a speech-dominated frame, the speech is categorized into either a voiced frame or an unvoiced frame. A voiced frame possesses a strong tone-like spectrum in lower subbands, so that the WCs of lower-band must be reserved. On the contrary, the WCT tends to increase in lower-band if the speech is categorized as unvoiced. In a noise-dominated frame, the background noise can be almost completely removed by increasing the WCT. The objective and subjective experimental results are then used to evaluate the proposed system. The experiments show that this algorithm is valid on various noise conditions, especially for color noise and non-stationary noise conditions.