• Journal of electromagnetic engineering and science
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.49-60
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• 2005

In this paper, an efficient performance enhancement scheme for an adaptive antenna array under the flat and the frequency-selective Rayleigh fadings is proposed. The proposed signal enhancement scheme is the modified linear signal estimator which combines the rank N approximation by reducing noise eigenvalues(RANE) and Toeplitz matrix approximation(TMA) methods into the linear signal estimator. The proposed performance enhancement scheme is performed by not only reducing the noise component from the signal-plus-noise subspace using RANE but also having the theoretical property of noise-free signal using TMA. Consequently, the key idea of the proposed performance enhancement scheme is to greatly enhance the performance of an adaptive antenna array by removing all undesired noise effects from the post-correlation received signal. The proposed performance enhancement scheme applies at the Wiener maximal ratio combining(MRC) method which has been widely used as the conventional adaptive antenna array. It is shown through several simulation results that the performance of an adaptive antenna array using the proposed signal enhancement scheme is much superior to that of a system using the conventional method under several environments, i.e., a flat Rayleigh fading, a fast frequency-selective Rayleigh fading, a perfect/imperfect power control, a single cell, and a multicell.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1793-1801
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• 2016

Speech enhancement is a challenging problem due to the diversity of noise sources and their effects in different applications. The goal of speech enhancement is to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech by reducing noise. Many research works in speech enhancement have been accomplished in English and other European Languages. There has been limited or no such works or efforts in the past in the context of Tamil speech enhancement in the literature. The aim of the proposed method is to reduce the background noise present in the Tamil speech signal by using wavelets. New modified thresholding function is introduced. The proposed method is evaluated on several speakers and under various noise conditions including White Gaussian noise, Babble noise and Car noise. The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) results show that the proposed thresholding function improves the speech enhancement compared to the conventional hard and soft thresholding methods.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.366-375
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• 2016

This paper describes an algorithm to suppress composite noise in a two-microphone speech enhancement system for robust hands-free speech communication. The proposed algorithm has four stages. The first stage estimates the power spectral density of the residual stationary noise, which is based on the detection of nonstationary signal-dominant time-frequency bins (TFBs) at the generalized sidelobe canceller output. Second, speech-dominant TFBs are identified among the previously detected nonstationary signal-dominant TFBs, and power spectral densities of speech and residual nonstationary noise are estimated. In the final stage, the bin-wise output signal-to-noise ratio is obtained with these power estimates and a Wiener post-filter is constructed to attenuate the residual noise. Compared to the conventional beamforming and post-filter algorithms, the proposed speech enhancement algorithm shows significant performance improvement in terms of perceptual evaluation of speech quality.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.386-393
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• 2008

This paper proposes a new approach for speech enhancement in highly nonstationary noisy environments. The spectral subtraction (SS) is a well known technique for speech enhancement in stationary noisy environments. However, in real world, noise is mostly nonstationary. The proposed method uses an auto control parameter for an adaptive threshold to work well in highly nonstationary noisy environments. Especially, the auto control parameter is affected by a linear function associated with an a posteriori signal to noise ratio (SNR) according to the increase or the decrease of the noise level. The proposed algorithm is combined with spectral subtraction (SS) using a hangover scheme (HO) for speech enhancement. The performances of the proposed method are evaluated ITU-T P.835 signal distortion (SIG) and the segment signal to-noise ratio (SNR) in various and highly nonstationary noisy environments and is superior to that of conventional spectral subtraction (SS) using a hangover (HO) and SS using a minimum statistics (MS) methods.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.169-174
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• 2003

A novel subspace speech enhancement using subband whitening filter is proposed. Previous subspace speech enhancement method either assumes additive white noise or uses whitening filter as a pre-processing for colored noise. The proposed method tries to minimize the signal distortion while reducing residual noise by processing the signal using subband whitening filter. By incorporating the notion of subband whitening filter, spectral resolution in Karhunen-Loeve(KL) domain is improved with the negligible additional computational load. The proposed method outperforms both the subspace method suggested by Ephraim and the spectral subtraction suggested by Boll in terms of segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SNRseg) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.43-51
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that improves a tone quality of a noisy audio signal in order to enhance a Performance of perceptual filter using noise energy control. Most of the algorithms which were proposed by the other researchers usually applied a filter using the noise energy acquired from a silent range. In this case. the improvement rate of tone quality decreases if the noise energy is changed by the magnitude or environment variation in a signal frame. But the Proposed method Provides the means to find a food estimated noise through energy control of the estimated noise which is obtained from a silent range. Also we can get the enhancement of tone qualify in low frequency band unlike other methods. To show the performance of the Proposed algorithm, various input signals which had a different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) such as 5dB, l0dB, 15dB and 20dB were used to test the proposed algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, we could confirm the enhancement of tone quality in terms of segmental SNR (SSNR). noise-to-mask ration (NMR) and mean opinion score (MOS) test.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.772-782
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• 2014

Two-microphone binary mask speech enhancement (2mBMSE) has been of particular interest in recent literature and has shown promising results. Current 2mBMSE systems rely on spatial cues of speech and noise sources. Although these cues are helpful for directional noise sources, they lose their efficiency in diffuse noise fields. We propose a new system that is effective in both directional and diffuse noise conditions. The system exploits two features. The first determines whether a given time-frequency (T-F) unit of the input spectrum is dominated by a diffuse or directional source. A diffuse signal is certainly a noise signal, but a directional signal could correspond to a noise or speech source. The second feature discriminates between T-F units dominated by speech or directional noise signals. Speech enhancement is performed using a binary mask, calculated based on the proposed features. In both directional and diffuse noise fields, the proposed system segregates speech T-F units with hit rates above 85%. It outperforms previous solutions in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and perceptual evaluation of speech quality improvement, especially in diffuse noise conditions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.334-337
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• 2005

The speech intelligibility is one of the most important factors in communication system. The speech intelligibility is related with speech to noise ratio. To enhance the speech to noise ratio, background noise reduction techniques are being developed. As a part of solution to noise reduction, this paper introduces directional microphone using beamforming method and speech filtering method. The directional microphone narrows the spatial range of processing signal into the direction of the target speech signal. The noise signal located in the same direction with speech still remains in the processing signal. To sort this mixed signal into speech and noise, as a following step, a speech-filtering method is applied to pick up only the speech signal from the processed signal. The speech filtering method is based on the characteristics of speech signal itself. The combined directional microphone and speech filtering method gives enhanced performance to speech intelligibility in communication system.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.87-92
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• 2012

Speech enhancement aims to improve speech quality by removing background noise from noisy speech. Independent vector analysis is a type of frequency-domain independent component analysis method that is known to be free from the frequency bin permutation problem in the process of blind source separation from multi-channel inputs. This paper proposed a new method of microphone array based speech enhancement that combines independent vector analysis and beamforming techniques. Independent vector analysis is used to separate speech and noise components from multi-channel noisy speech, and delay-sum beamforming is used to determine the enhanced speech among the separated signals. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments for computer simulated multi-channel noisy speech with various signal-to-noise ratios were carried out, and both PESQ and output signal-to-noise ratio were obtained as objective speech quality measures. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method is superior to the conventional microphone array based noise removal approach like GSC beamforming in the speech enhancement.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.544-551
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• 2023

Speech enhancement used to improve the perceptual quality and intelligibility of noise speech has been studied as a method using a complex-valued spectrum that can improve both magnitude and phase in a method using a magnitude spectrum. In this paper, a study was conducted on how to apply attention mechanism to complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement systems to further improve the intelligibility and quality of noise speech. The attention is performed based on additive attention and allows the attention weight to be calculated in consideration of the complex-valued spectrum. In addition, the global average pooling was used to consider the importance of the feature map. Complex-valued spectrum-based speech enhancement was performed based on the Deep Complex U-Net (DCUNET) model, and additive attention was conducted based on the proposed method in the Attention U-Net model. The results of the experiments on noise speech in a living room environment showed that the proposed method is improved performance over the baseline model according to evaluation metrics such as Source to Distortion Ratio (SDR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Short Time Object Intelligence (STOI), and consistently improved performance across various background noise environments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Through this, the proposed speech enhancement system demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the intelligibility and quality of noisy speech.