A variant of SWEMDH technique based on variational mode decomposition for speech enhancement

Abstract

In Speech Enhancement (SE) techniques, the major challenging task is to suppress non-stationary noises including white noise in real-time application scenarios. Many techniques have been developed for enhancing the vocal signals; however, those were not effective for suppressing non-stationary noises very well. Also, those have high time and resource consumption. As a result, Sliding Window Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hurst (SWEMDH)-based SE method where the speech signal was decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) based on the sliding window and the noise factor in each IMF was chosen based on the Hurst exponent data. Also, the least corrupted IMFs were utilized to restore the vocal signal. However, this technique was not suitable for white noise scenarios. Therefore in this paper, a Variant of Variational Mode Decomposition (VVMD) with SWEMDH technique is proposed to reduce the complexity in real-time applications. The key objective of this proposed SWEMD-VVMDH technique is to decide the IMFs based on Hurst exponent and then apply the VVMD technique to suppress both low- and high-frequency noisy factors from the vocal signals. Originally, the noisy vocal signal is decomposed into many IMFs using SWEMDH technique. Then, Hurst exponent is computed to decide the IMFs with low-frequency noisy factors and Narrow-Band Components (NBC) is computed to decide the IMFs with high-frequency noisy factors. Moreover, VVMD is applied on the addition of all chosen IMF to remove both low- and high-frequency noisy factors. Thus, the speech signal quality is improved under non-stationary noises including additive white Gaussian noise. Finally, the experimental outcomes demonstrate the significant speech signal improvement under both non-stationary and white noise surroundings.