A practical model for speech enhancement/recognition using composite source

To compare the performance of two speech coders, it is necessary to have some indicator of the intelligibility and quality of the speech produced by each coder. The term intelligibility usually refers to whether the output speech is easily understandable, while the term quality is an indicator of how natural the speech sounds. It is possible for a coder to produce highly intelligible speech that is low quality in that the speech may sound very machine-like and the speaker is not identifiable. On the other hand, it is unlikely that unintelligible speech would be called high quality, but there are situations in which perceptually pleasing speech does not have high intelligibility. This paper has presented a new approach to speech enhancement assuming a lack of prior information about the noise . The new approach has shown improved performance over conventional enhancement algorithms in both objective and subjective evaluations. We briefly discuss here the most common measures of intelligibility and quality used informal tests of speech coders.