Design of a Voice Activity Detection Algorithm based on Logarithmic Signal Energy

Abstract

This article presents a new method for calculating the signal energies of speech segments in voice activity detection algorithms. In the study, the μ-law signal compression method is adapted to calculate short-term signal energies. A simple voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The same VAD algorithm was also run with two different conventional energy calculation formulas and the performance of each VAD was evaluated using time-domain short-time energy features. The G729 standard VAD algorithm was also used for performance comparison. During the test of the analyzed detectors, many kinds of input speech signals with various types of background environmental noise, such as restaurants, vehicles, and streets, were tested. Using the new energy calculation method, the VAD detector has improved detection accuracy compared to VAD detectors based on the other two energy methods and was able to effectively identify voice-active regions even in noisy conditions at low SNR levels. The results revealed that the VAD detector designed with the proposed new energy calculation formula outperforms traditional energy-based voice activity detection methods and provides noticeable increases in detection rate even under adverse conditions.