Speech enhancement based on masking properties of the auditory system

This paper addresses the problem of the intelligibility enhancement of speech corrupted by additive background noise in a single channel system. The proposed algorithm uses a criterion based on the human perception. It is a variation of the well-known spectral subtraction method which is attractive because of its simplicity, but introduces an unnatural and unpleasant residual noise. The proposed approach incorporates in this method considerations about noise masking of the auditory system. It succeeds in finding the best trade-off between noise reduction and speech distortion in a perceptual sense. Simulations show perceptually very satisfactory results and objective measures indicate a quality improvement. The speech processed with this new algorithm sounds more pleasant to a human listener than those obtained by the classical methods. This shows the relevance to incorporate perceptual aspects in the enhancement process.