EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing - Special issue on digital signal processing for hearing instruments
Adaptive Time Segmentation for Improved Speech Enhancement
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
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A new approach for preservation of transient parts of speech in a noise reduction system is proposed in this paper. Transient components of speech such as vowel onset and beginning of some consonants such as stop sounds are important parts for intelligibility of speech. These components are usually attenuated by noise reduction algorithms due to the low temporal resolution of block-based noise reduction techniques. A method is proposed to detect the transient component of speech, followed by dynamic switching of the analysis filter bank at the front end of the noise reduction system to provide higher resolution in the time domain. The optimal spectral gain values are transformed into the time domain to form a linear filter in order to achieve noise reduction and only group delay equalisation is performed to avoid discontinuity. Our objective evaluation shows that the proposed method provides superior performance compared to noise reduction with fixed time/frequency resolution analysis filter banks.