Speech Enhancement in Functional MRI Environment using Adaptive Sub-Band Algorithms

Very high level of acoustic noise in fMRI scanner rooms disrupts speech communication between the subject and the physician/researcher. Enhancing speech in such an environment is challenging due to the broadband and dynamic nature of the noise. Sub-band adaptive methods prove to be very effective in cancelling such noise. In this paper we present the results of using sub-band adaptive methods for enhancing speech corrupted by noise from a 3-Tesla fMRI scanner. We also observe that the performance depends on the synthesis filter bank structure.