Restoration of intermittent speech signal relying on auditory perceptual capability

Abstract

Speech signals are frequently transmitted through the IP network. In such situation, a packet loss causes a temporal break in receiving speech signals. The intermittent speech signals make speech communication uncomfortable. However, the intermittent speech signal can be heard smoothly under certain conditions, because the brain reconstructs the missing speech packet unconsciously. This auditory illusory phenomenon, that is, the phonemic restoration effect, occurs under severe noisy conditions [Miller and Licklider, 1950]. In short, a speech signal with a heavy background noise, of which signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is less than 0 dB, overcomes the intermittency in receiving speech signals, although the noisy speech signal makes us uncomfortable in speech communication. In this paper, we propose a speech signal restoration scheme with auxiliary signal processing to positively enhance our phonemic restoration capabilities under less noisy condition. First, we discuss the characteristics of the background no...