Proposal of a speech detector based on eigenspectra

This letter deals with the problem of speech detection in the context of hands-free telecommunications. The principle of the detectors studied is based on the coherence function (ordinary or partial coherence), which is usually computed from the periodogram (first approach). The present work is aimed at proposing a new approach to compute the coherence from the eigenspectra with a view to reduce the bias. A statistical analysis is carried out to estimate the bias of both coherence estimators. Both approaches are compared experimentally, and results show the superiority of the new estimator.