preprints.org > engineering > electrical and electronic engineering > doi: 10.20944/preprints202103.0221.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 4 March 2021 / Approved: 8 March 2021 / Online: 8 March 2021 (13:39:44 CET)

The inaccurate estimates of linear prediction coefficient (LPC) and noise variance introduce bias in Kalman filter (KF) gain and degrades speech enhancement performance. The existing methods proposed a tuning of the biased Kalman gain particularly in stationary noise condition. This paper introduces a tuning of the KF gain for speech enhancement in real-life noise conditions. First, we estimate noise from each noisy speech frame using a speech presence probability (SPP) method to compute the noise variance. Then construct a whitening filter (with its coefficients computed from the estimated noise) and employed to the noisy speech, yielding a pre-whitened speech, from where the speech LPC parameters are computed. Then construct KF with the estimated parameters, where the robustness metric offsets the bias in Kalman gain during speech absence to that of the sensitivity metric during speech presence to achieve better noise reduction. Where the noise variance and the speech model parameters are adopted as a speech activity detector. The reduced-biased Kalman gain enables the KF to minimize the noise effect significantly, yielding the enhanced speech. Objective and subjective scores on NOIZEUS corpus demonstrates that the enhanced speech produced by the proposed method exhibits higher quality and intelligibility than some benchmark methods.

Speech enhancement; Kalman filter; Kalman gain; robustness metric; sensitivity metric; LPC, whitening filter; real-life noise

Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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