Speech enhancement to overcome the effect of near-end noise in mobile phones using psychoacoustics

In mobile phones, perceived quality of speech signal deteriorates significantly in the presence of near-end/surrounding noise as it arrives at the near-end listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by developing speech enhancement algorithms. Paper focuses on the impact of near-end noises on signal degradation. Gain adjustment process employing psychoacoustic has been adopted to improve the intelligibility and quality of the speech signal in the noisy environments by automatically enhancing the speech signals when the noise dominates. Intelligibility and quality of enhanced speech signal are measured using SII and PESQ. Experimental results show intelligibility and quality improvement of speech signal with the proposed method over the unprocessed far-end speech signal. Approach is more efficient in overcoming the degradation of speech signals in presence of near-end noise.