Enhancement of noise-suppressed speech by spectral processing implemented in a digital signal processor

Abstract

This paper presents a noisy suppressed speech enhancement method by combining the basic spectral subtraction technique and spectral processing in the frequency domain to provide better noise suppression as well as better enhancement in the speech regions. In contrast to several previous approaches we do not try to achieve a complete removal of the noise, but instead our goal is to preserve a pre-defined amount of the original noise in the processed signal. This is accomplished by exploiting the masking properties of the human auditory system. The proposed algorithm is named PM “Proposed Method” which simulates properties of the human auditory system and applies it to the speech recognition system to enhance its robustness. The performance of the speech enhancement algorithm using the proposed masking model was compared with three other speech enhancement methods over 4 different noise types and five SNRs. The performances of the proposed approach are objectively and subjectively compared to the conventional approaches to highlight the aforementioned improvement. In this paper we discuss the design and development of a digital signal processor (DSP) implementation to achieve real-time performance of our filter. The target processor is a Texas Instruments TMS320C6713 floating point DSP.