Filtering of a Dissonant Frequency for Speech Enhancement

There have been numerous studies on the enhancement of the noisy speech signal. In this paper, we propose a completely new speech enhancement scheme, that is, a filtering of a dissonant frequency (especially F# in each octave of the tempered scale) based on the fundamental frequency which is developed in frequency domain. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed enhancement scheme, subjective tests (MOS tests) were conducted. The subjective test results indicate that the proposed method provides a significant gain in audible improvement especially for speech contaminated by colored noise and speaking in a husky voice. Therefore when the filter is employed as a pre-filter for speech enhancement, the output speech quality and intelligibility is greatly enhanced.