A perceptually motivated LP residual estimator in noisy and reverberant environments

Abstract Both reverberation and additive noise can degrade the quality of recorded speech and thus should be suppressed simultaneously. Previous studies have shown that the generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) has the capability of suppressing the additive noise effectively, but it is not often applied for speech dereverberation since reverberation is considered to be convolutive as well as colored noise. Recently, we revealed that late reverberation is also additive and relatively white interference component in the linear prediction (LP) residual domain. To suppress both late reverberation and additive noise, we have proposed an optimal filter for LP residual estimator (LPRE) based on a constrained minimum mean square error (CMMSE) by using GSVD in single channel speech enhancement, where the algorithm is referred as CMMSE-GSVD-LPRE. Experimental results have shown a better performance of the CMMSE-GSVD-LPRE than spectral subtraction methods, but some residual noise and reverberation components are still audible and annoying. To solve this problem, this paper incorporates the masking properties of the human auditory system in the LP residual domain to further suppress these residual noise and reverberation components while reducing speech distortion at the same time. Various simulation experiments are conducted, and the results show an improved performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results with speech recorded in noisy and reverberant environments further confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in real-world environments.