A Perceptual Approach to Reduce Musical Noise Phenomenon with Wiener Denoising Technique

Traditional denoising techniques, powerful in terms of noise reduction, have the drawback of generating an annoying musical noise. This paper addresses the problem of enhancing speech in highly noisy environments using perceptual considerations. The postprocessing technique we develop, considers the masking threshold of both noisy speech and the denoised one, to detect musical noise components. Next, to make them inaudible, detected musical noise candidates are set under the noise masking threshold and their closest neighbors are smoothed. Extensive subjective and objective tests have shown that, after enhancement, the musical noise is well reduced even at very low signal to noise ratios

[1]  Laurence Boney,et al.  Tewfik and Khaled N. Hamdy, Digital Watermarks for Audio Signals , 1996 .

[2]  Dennis H. Klatt,et al.  Prediction of perceived phonetic distance from critical-band spectra: A first step , 1982, ICASSP.

[3]  Nathalie Virag,et al.  Single channel speech enhancement based on masking properties of the human auditory system , 1999, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[4]  Eliathamby Ambikairajah,et al.  Speech denoising using perceptual modification of Wiener filtering , 2002 .

[5]  Ahmed H. Tewfik,et al.  Digital watermarks for audio signals , 1996, 1996 8th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 1996).

[6]  David Malah,et al.  Speech enhancement using optimal non-linear spectral amplitude estimation , 1983, ICASSP.

[7]  Tim Haulick,et al.  Residual noise suppression using psychoacoustic criteria , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

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

[9]  Régine Le Bouquin-Jeannès,et al.  Optimizing speech enhancement by exploiting masking properties of the human ear , 1995, 1995 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[10]  Wonho Yang,et al.  A modified bark spectral distortion measure which uses noise masking threshold , 1997, 1997 IEEE Workshop on Speech Coding for Telecommunications Proceedings. Back to Basics: Attacking Fundamental Problems in Speech Coding.

[11]  Schuyler Quackenbush,et al.  Objective measures of speech quality , 1995 .

[12]  John Mourjopoulos,et al.  Speech enhancement based on audible noise suppression , 1997, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[13]  David Malah,et al.  Speech enhancement using a minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude estimator , 1984, IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process..