Speech signals are often degraded by additive interference over single-channel communication systems. For stationary and well defined noise sources, effective solutions exist. However, it is often difficult to formulate a model for nonstationary and speechlike noise sources such as crosstalk or multispeaker babble, which exist in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem under the assumption that we have access to the clean speech signal prior to transmission. A novel method for tracking transmission noise characteristics is described. Based on this noise estimate, a new speech enhancement technique is proposed. The enhancement method is evaluated for multispeaker babble noise, and shown to substantially improve both the quality and intelligibility of the processed speech signal.
Published in:
Signal Processing Letters, IEEE
(Volume:4
,
Issue:
4
)
Date of Publication: April 1997