A comparative study on single-channel noise estimation methods for speech enhancement

This paper studies a number of well-known noise estimation techniques and provides a comparative performance analysis of them in speech enhancement platform. Two types of evaluation data that simulate consistent and inconsistent noisy conditions are prepared in the presence of six noise types at different SNR levels. The performance of speech enhancement systems and the spectrum distance of the estimated and original noise spectrums are used as evaluation criteria. The evaluations indicate that a simple VAD method outperforms noise estimation methods in most of the consistent noisy conditions.