Reduction of Background Noise in Alaryngeal Speech using Spectral Subtraction with Quantile Based Noise Estimation

The transcervical electrolarynx or external electronic larynx is used b y persons who cannot use their natural voice production mechanism. The device is a vibrator held against t he neck tissue, and the vibrations generated move up the vocal t ract t o produce a laryngeal speech. Presence of background noise, due to leakage of the acoustic energy from the vibrator, degrades the resulting alaryngeal speech. This paper presents a single input technique for r educing the background noise in alaryngeal speech signal, using spectral subtraction in a pitch synchronous manner. Updating of the noise magnitude spectrum is carried out using quantile based no ise e stimation, which do es not require speech/non-speech detection.

[1]  Parveen Lehana,et al.  Enhancement of alaryngeal speech using spectral subtraction , 2002, 2002 14th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing Proceedings. DSP 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8628).

[2]  Richard M. Schwartz,et al.  Enhancement of speech corrupted by acoustic noise , 1979, ICASSP.

[3]  Nicholas W. D. Evans,et al.  Noise estimation without explicit speech, non-speech detection: a comparison of mean, modal and median based approaches , 2001, INTERSPEECH.

[4]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in C , 2002 .

[5]  Caroline B. Huang,et al.  Enhancement of alaryngeal speech by adaptive filtering , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[6]  Alexander Fischer,et al.  Quantile based noise estimation for spectral subtraction and Wiener filtering , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37100).

[7]  M.G. Bellanger,et al.  Digital processing of speech signals , 1980, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[8]  S. Boll,et al.  Suppression of acoustic noise in speech using spectral subtraction , 1979 .

[9]  H. L. Barney,et al.  An experimental transistorized artificial larynx , 1959 .

[10]  J. Heinz,et al.  Acoustical and perceptual characteristics of speech produced with an electronic artificial larynx. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  John Mason,et al.  Efficient real-time noise estimation without explicit speech, non-speech detection: an assessment on the AURORA corpus , 2002, 2002 14th International Conference on Digital Signal Processing Proceedings. DSP 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8628).

[12]  B Weinberg,et al.  Low-frequency energy deficit in electrolaryngeal speech. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.