Single-channel online enhancement of speech corrupted by reverberation and noise

Abstract

This paper proposes an online single-channel speech enhancement method designed to improve the quality of speech degraded by reverberation and noise. Based on an autoregressive model for the reverberation power and on a hidden Markov model for clean speech production, a Bayesian filtering formulation of the problem is derived and online joint estimation of the acoustic parameters and mean speech, reverberation, and noise powers is obtained in mel-frequency bands. From these estimates, a real-valued spectral gain is derived and spectral enhancement is applied in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain. The method yields state-of-the-art performance and greatly reduces the effects of reverberation and noise while improving speech quality and preserving speech intelligibility in challenging acoustic environments.