SNR improvement with speech enhancement techniques

Abstract

Speech enhancement aims to improve the speech quality by using various techniques. Spectral Subtraction Technique is one earliest and longer standing, popular approaches to noise compensation and speech enhancement. It reduces stationary noise but the non stationary noise still passes through it. Further, it also introduces a musical noise which is very annoying to human ears. Beamforming is another possible method of speech enhancement that can be used. Beamforming by itself, however, does not appear to provide enough improvement. Further, the performance of Beamforming becomes worse if the noise source comes from many directions or the speech has strong reverberation. A combined technique using the Spectral Subtraction Technique followed by Beamforming Technique reduces stationary as well as residual, musical noise. It can be observed that the Spectral Subtraction followed by Beamforming gives better SNR value as compared to that of individual techniques, thereby improving the quality of speech. Numerous simulation results are used to illustrate the reasoning.