TY - JOUR
T1 - On Optimal Linear Filtering of Speech for Near-End Listening Enhancement
AU - Taal, Cees H.
AU - Jensen, Jesper
AU - Leijon, Arne
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - In this letter the focus is on linear filtering of speech before degradation due to additive background noise. The goal is to design the filter such that the speech intelligibility index (SII) is maximized when the speech is played back in a known noisy environment. Moreover, a power constraint is taken into account to prevent uncomfortable playback levels and deal with loudspeaker constraints. Previous methods use linear approximations of the SII in order to find a closed-form solution. However, as we show, these linear approximations introduce errors in low SNR regions and are therefore suboptimal. In this work we propose a nonlinear approximation of the SII which is accurate for all SNRs. Experiments show large intelligibility improvements with the proposed method over the unprocessed noisy speech and better performance than one state-of-the art method.
AB - In this letter the focus is on linear filtering of speech before degradation due to additive background noise. The goal is to design the filter such that the speech intelligibility index (SII) is maximized when the speech is played back in a known noisy environment. Moreover, a power constraint is taken into account to prevent uncomfortable playback levels and deal with loudspeaker constraints. Previous methods use linear approximations of the SII in order to find a closed-form solution. However, as we show, these linear approximations introduce errors in low SNR regions and are therefore suboptimal. In this work we propose a nonlinear approximation of the SII which is accurate for all SNRs. Experiments show large intelligibility improvements with the proposed method over the unprocessed noisy speech and better performance than one state-of-the art method.
U2 - 10.1109/LSP.2013.2240297
DO - 10.1109/LSP.2013.2240297
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1070-9908
VL - 20
SP - 225
EP - 228
JO - I E E E Signal Processing Letters
JF - I E E E Signal Processing Letters
IS - 3
ER -