Two-level optimization approach with accelerated proximal gradient for objective measures in sparse speech reconstruction

Compressive speech enhancement makes use of the sparseness of speech and the non-sparseness of noise in time-frequency representation to perform speech enhancement. However, reconstructing the sparsest output may not necessarily translate to a good enhanced speech signal as speech distortion may be at risk. This paper proposes a two level optimization approach to incorporate objective quality measures in compressive speech enhancement. The proposed method combines the accelerated proximal gradient approach and a global one dimensional optimization method to solve the sparse reconstruction. By incorporating objective quality measures in the optimization process, the reconstructed output is not only sparse but also maintains the highest objective quality score possible. In other words, the sparse speech reconstruction process is now quality sparse speech reconstruction. Experimental results in a compressive speech enhancement consistently show score improvement in objectives measures in different noisy environments compared to the non-optimized method. Additionally, the proposed optimization yields a higher convergence rate with a lower computational complexity compared to the existing methods.