A New Statistical Voice Activity Detection Based on UMP Test

Abstract

This letter presents a new voice activity detection (VAD) method using a uniformly most powerful (UMP) test to improve the performance of Sohn's et al.'s VAD. The UMP test is employed to derive a redefined decision rule based on the likelihood ratio test (LRT). The proposed method provides the decision rule by comparing the magnitude of the noisy speech signal to the adaptive threshold estimated from the noise statistics. Experimental results show that the proposed VAD algorithm based on the UMP test outperforms those based on the widely used Gaussian distribution.