Speech Enhancement Using Spectral Subtraction Technique With Minimized Cross Spectral Components

Abstract

The aim of speech enhancement is to get significant reduction of noise and enhanced speech from noisy speech. There are several approaches for speech enhancement .earlier approaches didn't consider cross spectral terms into account. Cross spectral terms become prominent when processing window size becomes small i.e. 20ms-30ms. In this paper, an enhancement method is proposed for significant reduction of noise, and improvement in the quality and perceptibility of speech degraded by correlated additive background noise. The proposed method is based on the spectral subtraction technique. The simple spectral subtraction technique results in poor reduction of noise. One of the main reasons for this is neglecting the cross spectral terms of speech and noise, based on the appropriation that clean speech and noise signals are completely uncorrelated to each other, which is not true on short time basis. In this paper an improvement in reduction of the noise is achieved as compared to the earlier methods. This fact is mainly attributed to the cross spectral terms between speech and noise. This algorithm can be implemented and used in hearing aids for the benefit of hearing impaired people. Objective speech quality measures, spectrogram analyses and subjective listening tests conforms the proposed method is more effective in comparison with earlier speech enhancement techniques.