• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.11
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• pp.82-88
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose an intelligibility enhancement algorithm for multimedia contents using spectral shaping. The dialogue signals is essential to understand the plot of audio-visual media contents such as movie and TV. However, the non-dialogue components as like sound effects and background music often degrade the dialogue clarity. To overcome this problem, this paper tries to improves the dialogue clarity of audio soundtracks which contain important cues for the visual scenes. In the proposed method, the dialogue components are first detected by soft masker based on speech presence probability (SPP) which is widely used in speech enhancement field. Then, extracted dialogue signals are applied to the spectral shaping method. It reallocate the spectral-temporal energy of speech to enhanced the intelligibility. The total energy is maintained as unchanged via a loudness normalization process to prevent saturation. The algorithm was evaluated using the modeled and real movie soundtracks and it was shown that the proposed algorithm enhances the dialogue clarity while preserving the total audio power.