Speech Enhancement Based on EMD and Wavelet Threshold in Noisy Environments

Abstract

Speech enhancement is crucial for speech recognition accuracy. How to eliminate the effect of the noise constitutes a challenging problem in speech processing. This paper presents a new technique for speech enhancement in a noisy environment based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm and wavelet threshold. With the EMD, the noise speech signals can be decomposed into a sum of the band-limited function called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), which is a zero-mean AM-FM component. Then wavelet threshold of the IMF components can be used to eliminate the effect of the noise for speech enhancement. Experimental results show that the proposed speech enhancement by de-noising algorithm is possible to achieve an excellent balance between suppresses noise effectively and preserves as many target characteristics of original signal as possible.