Speech Enhancement Based on Noise Eigenspace Projection

Abstract

How to reduce noise with less speech distortion is a challenging issue for speech enhancement. We propose a novel approach for reducing noise with the cost of less speech distortion. A noise signal can generally be considered to consist of two components, a “white-like” component with a uniform energy distribution and a “color” component with a concentrated energy distribution in some frequency bands. An approach based on noise eigenspace projections is proposed to pack the color component into a subspace, named “noise subspace”. This subspace is then removed from the eigenspace to reduce the color component. For the white-like component, a conventional enhancement algorithm is adopted as a complementary processor. We tested our algorithm on a speech enhancement task using speech data from the Texas Instruments and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (TIMIT) dataset and noise data from NOISEX-92. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm efficiently reduces noise with little speech distortion. Objective and subjective evaluations confirmed that the proposed algorithm outperformed conventional enhancement algorithms.