• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.16-24
• /
• 2007

Voice activity detectors (VADs) are important in wireless communication and speech signal processing. In the conventional VAD methods. an expression for the likelihood ratio test (LRT) based on statistical models is derived. Then, speech or noise is decided by comparing the value of the expression with a threshold. We propose a new method with the modified decision rule based on the Gaussian distribution and the uniformly most power (UMP) test. This method requires the distribution of the absolute value of the incoming speech signal. Then we can obtain the final decision through the relation between the Rayleigh distributions. This VAD method can detect speech without a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which is required in the conventional VAD algorithms. Additionally, in the various VAD performance tests, the proposed VAD method is shown to be more effective than the traditional scheme.