HMM-based Speech Enhancement Research Articles

Speech enhancement using hidden Markov models in Mel-frequency domain

Hidden Markov model (HMM)-based minimum mean square error speech enhancement method in Mel-frequency domain is focused on and a parallel cepstral and spectral (PCS) modeling is proposed. Both Mel-frequency spectral (MFS) and Mel-frequency cepstral (MFC) features are studied and experimented for speech enhancement. To estimate clean speech waveform from a noisy signal, an inversion from the Mel-frequency domain to the spectral domain is required which introduces distortion artifacts in the spectrum estimation and the filtering. To reduce the corrupting effects of the inversion, the PCS modeling is proposed. This method performs concurrent modeling in both cepstral and magnitude spectral domains. In addition to the spectrum estimator, magnitude spectrum, log-magnitude spectrum and power spectrum estimators are also studied and evaluated in the HMM-based speech enhancement framework.The performances of the proposed methods are evaluated in the presence of five noise types with different SNR levels and the results are compared with several established speech enhancement methods especially auto-regressive HMM-based speech enhancement. The experimental results for both subjective and objective tests confirm the superiority of the proposed methods in the Mel-frequency domain over the reference methods, particularly for non-stationary noises.

Hidden-Markov-model-based voice activity detector with high speech detection rate for speech enhancement

A new voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm with soft decision output in Mel-frequency domain is developed based on hidden Markov model (HMM) and is incorporated in an HMM-based speech enhancement system. The proposed VAD uses a two-state ergodic HMM representing speech presence and speech absence. The states are constructed from noisy speech and noise HMMs used in the speech enhancement system. This composite model provides a robust detection of speech segments in the presence of noise and obviates the need for extra modeling in HMM-based speech enhancement applications. As the main purpose of the proposed VAD is to detect speech segments accurately, a hang-over mechanism is proposed and is applied on the output of the VAD to improve the speech detection rate. The VAD is integrated in the HMM-based speech enhancement system in Mel-frequency spectral (MFS) and cepstral (MFC) domains. The performance of the proposed VAD, the effectiveness of the hang-over mechanism and the performance of the VAD-integrated speech enhancement system are evaluated on four noise types at different SNR levels. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed VAD compared to the reference methods particularly for speech detection rate at the dominant noisy conditions.

HMM-based strategies for enhancement of speech signals embedded in nonstationary noise

An improved hidden Markov model-based (HMM-based) speech enhancement system designed using the minimum mean square error principle is implemented and compared with a conventional spectral subtraction system. The improvements to the system are: (1) incorporation of mixture components in the HMM for noise in order to handle noise nonstationarity in a more flexible manner, (2) two efficient methods in the speech enhancement system design that make the system real-time implementable, and (3) an adaptation method to the noise type in order to accommodate a wide variety of noise expected under the enhancement system's operating environment. The results of the experiments designed to evaluate the performance of the HMM-based speech enhancement systems in comparison with spectral subtraction are reported. Three types of noise-white noise, simulated helicopter noise, and multitalker (cocktail party) noise-were used to corrupt the test speech signals. Both objective (global SNR) and subjective mean opinion score (MOS) evaluations demonstrate consistent superiority of the HMM-based enhancement systems that incorporate the innovations described in this paper over the conventional spectral subtraction method.