Utilization of exponentiated amplitude spectrum for speech enhancement in highly noisy environments

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method that works effectively in highly noisy environments. The proposed method emphasizes the speech signal buried in noise without noise estimation. A p-th power amplitude spectrum is inverse Fourier transformed with the phase information of the noisy speech signal. Experiments show that as the amount of noise is increased, the proposed method provides a superior performance with an increment of p. Subjective evaluation validates the effectiveness of the proposed method in white noise even at a signal-to-noise ratio of -20 dB.