• ETRI Journal
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• 제36권5호
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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.

• 음성과학
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.71-76
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• 2005

There have been numerous studies on the enhancement of noisy speech signal. In this paper, we propose a new speech enhancement method, that is, a filtering of a dissonant frequency combined with noise suppression algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method provides a significant gain in voice clarity. Therefore if the proposed enhancement scheme is used as a pre-filter, the perceptual clarity of husky voice is greatly enhanced.

• Transactions on Control, Automation and Systems Engineering
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.7-12
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• 2000

A new speech enhancement algorithm for speech corrupted by slowly varying additive colored noise is suggested based on a state-space signal model. Due to the FIR structure and the unimportance of long-term past information, the receding horizon (RH) FIR filter known to be a best linear unbiased estimation (BLUE) filter is utilized in order to obtain noise-suppressed speech signal. As a special case of the colored noise problem, the suggested approach is generalized to perform the single blind signal separation of two speech signals. It is shown that the exact speech signal is obtained when an incoming speech signal is noise-free.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제28권7호
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• pp.668-673
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• 2009

본 논문에서는 최소값 제어 음성 존재 부정확성의 추정기법을 이용한 음성 향상 기법을 제안한다. 기존의 음성 존재 부정확성 추정기법에서는 간단한 a posteriori SNR에 근거하여 프레임, 채널마다 다른 a priori음성 부재 확률값을 결정하여 음성 부재 확률 계산에 적용하였다. 본 논문에서 제안된 알고리즘은 기존 음성 존재 부정확성 추적방법과는 달리 최소값 제어방법을 이용하여 주파수성분별 최소값에 근거한 강인한 a priori음성 부재 확률값 추정방법을 통해 음성 부재 확률에 적용하여 음성을 향상시킨다. 제안된 음성 향상 기법은 ITU-T P.862 perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ)를 이용하여 평가하였고 기존의 음성 존재 부정확성 추적방법보다 향상된 결과를 나타내었다.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2002년도 11월 학술대회지
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• pp.187-190
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• 2002

In this paper, a speech enhancement system using microphone array with MMSE-STSA (Minimum Mean Square Error-Short Time Spectral Amplitude) estimator based post-processing is proposed. Speech enhancement is first carried out by conventional delay-and-sum beamforming (DSB). A new MMSE-STSA estimator is then obtained by refining MMSE-STSA estimators from each microphone, which is applied to the output of conventional DSB to obtain additional speech enhancement. Computer simulation for white and pink noises show that the proposed system is superior to other approaches.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제23권4E호
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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.

• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전자공학회 2003년도 신호처리소사이어티 추계학술대회 논문집
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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.

• 전기학회논문지
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• 제59권6호
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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.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제36권5호
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• pp.721-729
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• 2014

We propose a novel phase-based method for single-channel speech enhancement to extract and enhance the desired signals in noisy environments by utilizing the phase information. In the method, a phase-dependent a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is estimated in the log-mel spectral domain to utilize both the magnitude and phase information of input speech signals. The phase-dependent estimator is incorporated into the conventional magnitude-based decision-directed approach that recursively computes the a priori SNR from noisy speech. Additionally, we reduce the performance degradation owing to the one-frame delay of the estimated phase-dependent a priori SNR by using a minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based and maximum a posteriori (MAP)-based estimator. In our speech enhancement experiments, the proposed phase-dependent a priori SNR estimator is shown to improve the output SNR by 2.6 dB for both the MMSE-based and MAP-based estimator cases as compared to a conventional magnitude-based estimator.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제29권7호
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• pp.468-474
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• 2010

음성인식의 실용화에 가장 저해되는 요소는 배경잡음과 채널잡음에 의한 왜곡이다. 일반적으로 배경잡음은 음성인식 시스템의 성능을 저하시키고 이로 인해 사용 장소의 제약을 받게 한다. DSR (Distributed Speech Recognition) 기반의 음성인식 역시 이와 같은 문제로 성능 향상에 어려움을 겪고 있다. 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해 다양한 잡음제거 알고리듬이 사용되고 있으나 낮은 SNR환경에서 부정확한 잡음추정으로 발생하는 스펙트럼 손상과 잔존 잡음은 음성인식기의 인식환경과 학습 환경의 불일치를 만들게 되어 인식률을 저하시키는 원인이 된다. 본 논문에서는 이와 같은 문제를 해결하기 위해 잡음제거 알고리듬으로 MMSE-STSA 방법을 사용하였고 손상된 스펙트럼을 보상하기 위해 Ideal Binary Mask를 이용하였다. 잡음환경 (SNR 15 ~ 0 dB)에 따른 실험결과 제안된 방법을 사용했을 때 향상된 스펙트럼을 얻을 수 있었고 향상된 인식성능을 확인했다.