Speech enhancement in a Bayesian framework

We present an approach for the enhancement of speech signals corrupted by additive white noise of Gaussian statistics. The speech enhancement problem is treated as a signal estimation problem within a Bayesian framework. The conventional all-pole speech production model is assumed to govern the behaviour of the clean speech signal. The additive noise level and all-pole model gain are automatically inferred during the speech enhancement process. The strength of the Bayesian approach developed in this paper lies in its ability to perform speech enhancement without the usual requirement of estimating the level of the corrupting noise from “silence” segments of the corrupted signal. The performance of the Bayesian approach is compared to that of the Lim & Oppenheim (1978) framework, to which it follows a similar iterative nature. A significant quality improvement is obtained over the Lim & Oppenheim framework