Improved A Posteriori Speech Presence Probability Estimation Based on a Likelihood Ratio With Fixed Priors

  • Authors:
  • T. Gerkmann;C. Breithaupt;R. Martin

  • Affiliations:
  • Inst. of Commun. Acoust. (IKA), Ruhr- Univ. Bochum, Bochum;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this paper, we present an improved estimator for the speech presence probability at each time-frequency point in the short-time Fourier transform domain. In contrast to existing approaches, this estimator does not rely on an adaptively estimated and thus signal-dependent a priori signal-to-noise ratio estimate. It therefore decouples the estimation of the speech presence probability from the estimation of the clean speech spectral coefficients in a speech enhancement task. Using both a fixed a priori signal-to-noise ratio and a fixed prior probability of speech presence, the proposed a posteriori speech presence probability estimator achieves probabilities close to zero for speech absence and probabilities close to one for speech presence. While state-of-the-art speech presence probability estimators use adaptive prior probabilities and signal-to-noise ratio estimates, we argue that these quantities should reflect true a priori information that shall not depend on the observed signal. We present a detection theoretic framework for determining the fixed a priori signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed estimator is conceptually simple and yields a better tradeoff between speech distortion and noise leakage than state-of-the-art estimators.