Kalman filtering speech enhancement incorporating masking properties for mobile communication in a car environment

A single channel speech enhancement system based on Kalman filtering and masking properties of the human auditory system is studied. The main objective of our study is to develop a high quality speech enhancement system for car mobile communication, which optimizes the tradeoff between speech distortion and noise reduction. To develop a robust Kalman filtering speech enhancement system, we propose that the noise variance estimate be modified as a function of masking threshold in each subband. By using such a Kalman filtering with masking method, we can achieve better results as compared to full band Kalman filtering, especially in the case of weak speech spectral components in noise. Through a great deal of simulations, we show the advantages of our proposed system in terms of objective and subjective measurements as compared to many existing speech enhancement methods.