Incorporating the human hearing properties in the signal subspace approach for speech enhancement

Abstract

The major drawback of most noise reduction methods in speech applications is the annoying residual noise known as musical noise. A potential solution to this artifact is the incorporation of a human hearing model in the suppression filter design. However, since the available models are usually developed in the frequency domain, it is not clear how they can be applied in the signal subspace approach for speech enhancement. In this paper, we present a Frequency to Eigendomain Transformation (FET) which permits to calculate a perceptually based eigenfilter. This filter yields an improved result where better shaping of the residual noise, from a perceptual perspective, is achieved. The proposed method can also be used with the general case of colored noise. Spectrogram illustrations and listening test results are given to show the superiority of the proposed method over the conventional signal subspace approach.