Good Noise Power Estimators Are Not Always Good

Methods for estimating the noise power in noisy speech signals have been developed and explored for many years. Thus, there are some good state-of-the-art noise power estimators, which were successfully tested on various noise types and different SNR conditions. Hence, a meeting scenario in an environment with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of some close-talk speech recordings, where also some stationary sensor noise has to be estimated, should not pose a challenging problem for good noise estimators. However, we observed that high SNR conditions, as well as multi-talk situations can mislead state-of-the-art noise power estimators, and sometimes a more simple approach is to be preferred. In this contribution we present an analysis of three different noise power estimators when used in a meeting scenario with interfering speakers.