• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.9-14
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• 2009

Speech enhancement methods can be generally classified into a few categories and they have been usually compared with each other in terms of speech quality. For the successful use of speech enhancement methods in speech recognition systems, performance comparisons in terms of speech recognition accuracy are necessary. In this paper, we compared the speech recognition performance of some of the representative speech enhancement algorithms which are popularly cited in the literature and used widely. We also compared the performance of speech enhancement methods with other noise robust speech recognition methods like PMC to verify the usefulness of speech enhancement approaches in noise robust speech recognition systems.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.259-269
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit-rate code-excited linear prediction (CELP) coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameter estimation and harmonic generation, and apply this technique to a current state-of-the-art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also, its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.6
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• pp.1120-1125
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• 2010

In the speech system, for example hearing aid as well as speech communication, speech quality is degraded by environmental noise. In this study, to enhance the speech quality which is degraded by environmental speech, we proposed an algorithm to reduce the noise and reinforce the speech. The minima controlled recursive averaging (MCRA) algorithm is used to estimate the noise spectrum and spectral weighting factor is used to reduce the noise. And partial masking effect which is one of the human hearing properties is introduced to reinforce the speech. Then we compared the waveform, spectrogram, Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and segmental Signal to Noise Ratio (segSNR) between original speech, noisy speech, noise reduced speech and enhanced speech by proposed method. As a result, enhanced speech by proposed method is reinforced in high frequency which is degraded by noise, and PESQ, segSNR is enhanced. It means that the speech quality is enhanced.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.512-517
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• 2018

Improving voice quality is a major concern in telecommunications. In this paper, we propose a robust speech quality enhancement against background noise and packet loss at VoIP (Voice-over-IP) receiver. The proposed method combines network jitter estimation based on hybrid Markov chain, adaptive playout scheduling using the estimated jitter, and speech enhancement based on restoration of amplitude and phase to enhance the quality of the speech signal arriving at the VoIP receiver over IP network. The experimental results show that the proposed method removes the background noise added to the speech signal before encoding at the sender side and provides the enhanced speech quality in an unstable network environment.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.4E
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• pp.125-133
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a critical banded wavelet packet-based spectral subtraction for speech enhancement. Critical banded wavelet packet, which reflects the human auditory system, may lead to minimization of intelligibility loss and quality improvement of the enhanced speech in the spectral domain, when combined with an appropriate spectral subtraction gain function. The proposed method shows better performance than the conventional one in comparative assessments. We also show that, for effective evaluation of enhanced speech, it is essential to consider the characteristics of speech quality measures.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.57-60
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit rate speech coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameters estimation and harmonic generation. and apply the technique to a current state of the art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1985.10a
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• pp.87-94
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• 1985

In this paper, enhancement of speech corrupted by additive white or colored noise is stuided. The nuconstrained frequency-domain block least-mean-square (UFBLMS) adaptation algorithm and its frequency-weighted version are newly applied to speech enhancement. For enhancement of speech degraded by white noise, the performance of the UFBLMS algorithm is superior to the spectral subtraction method or Wiener filtering technique by more than 3 dB in segmented frequency-weighted signal-to-noise ratio(FWSNERSEG) when SNR of speech is in the range of 0 to 10 dB. As for enhancement of noisy speech corrupted by colored noise, the UFBLMS algorithm is superior to that of the spectral subtraction method by about 3 to 5 dB in FWSNRSEG. Also, it yields better performance by about 2 dB in FWSNR and FWSNRSEG than that of time-domain least-mean-square (TLMS) adaptive prediction filter(APF). In view of the computational complexity and performance improvement in speech quality and intelligibility, the frequency-weighted UFBLMS algorithm appears to yield the best performance among various algorithms in enhancing noisy speech corrupted by white or colored noise.

• 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.