Spectrum estimation of short-time stationary signals in additive noise and channel distortion

In this work, spectrum estimation of a short-time stationary signal that is degraded by both channel distortion and additive noise is addressed. A maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) algorithm is developed to jointly identify the degradation system and estimate short-time signal spectra. The source signal is assumed to be generated by a hidden Markov model (HMM) with state-dependent short-time spectral distributions described by mixtures of Gaussian densities. The distortion channel is linear time-invariant, and the noise is Gaussian. The algorithm is derived by using the principle of expectation-maximization (EM), where the unknown parameters of channel and noise are estimated iteratively, and the short-time signal power spectra are obtained from the posterior sufficient statistics of the source signal. Other spectral representation parameters, such as autoregressive model parameters or cepstral parameters, are obtained by minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimation from the power spectral estimates. The estimation algorithm was evaluated on simulated signals at the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of 20 dB down to 0 dB, where it produced convergent estimation and significantly reduced spectral distortion.