Speech Enhancement with Nonstationary Acoustic Noise Detection in Time Domain

Abstract

This letter proposes a new time domain speech enhancement technique for signals corrupted by nonstationary acoustic noises. In this method, the noise components are detected and attenuated directly from the corrupted speech samples. They are obtained with a robust estimation of the noise standard deviation considering any speech and noise amplitude distribution. These values are used to define a noise selection threshold. Additionally, this solution does not require the usage of any spectral analysis or temporal decomposition as a pre-processing phase. The experiments results show that the proposed scheme leads to significant improvement in the speech quality and intelligibility when compared to competing enhancement approaches.