Integrated speech enhancement for functional MRI environment

This paper presents an integrated speech enhancement (SE) method for the noisy MRI environment. We show that the performance of SE system improves considerably when the speech signal dominated by MRI acoustic noise at very low SNR is enhanced in two successive stages using two-channel SE methods followed by a single-channel post processing SE algorithm. Actual MRI noisy speech data are used in our experiments showing the improved performance of the proposed SE method.