Speech enhancement with zero replacement signal at low SNR

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method with zero replacement signal of noisy speech signal. The proposed method utilizes the Fourier transform of the cross-correlation function between the noisy speech signal and zero replacement signal. Minimum values of the absolute value of the resulting spectrum become the power spectrum of original clean speech signal. For the proposed method, noise estimation is not required to emphasize the speech signal. By subjective evaluation in the presence of both stationary and non-stationary noises, it is shown that the proposed method provides better performance than the conventional method at lower signal-to-noise ratio.