A minimum variance distortionless response filter based on the bifrequency spectrum for single-channel noise reduction

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of single-channel noise reduction in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain. Many algorithms have been developed to solve this important problem, most of which generally assume that the STFT coefficients in different frequency bands are uncorrelated, so the noise reduction is achieved by applying a gain function to the STFT of the noisy speech in each frequency band. However, this assumption is not accurate and the STFT coefficients of speech signals between neighboring frequency bands are correlated in practice due to the use of small lengths of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and overlap add/save techniques in implementation. This paper formulates the noise reduction problem by taking into account the interband correlation using the so-called bifrequency spectrum. Based on this formulation, a single-channel minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) filter is derived, which is shown to be able to significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and meanwhile maintain the desired speech not much distorted. Simulations are presented to justify the claimed merits of the developed MVDR filter.