Musical-noise-free speech enhancement: Theory and evaluation

In this paper, we propose a new theory of nonlinear noise reduction with a perfectly musical-noise-free property, where no musical noise is generated even for a high signal-to-noise ratio. To achieve high-quality noise reduction with low musical noise, an iterative spectral subtraction method, i.e., recursively applied weak nonlinear signal processing, has been proposed. Although evaluation experiments indicated the existence of an appropriate parameter setting that gives a musical-noise-free state, no theoretical studies have been carried out. Therefore, in this paper, we theoretically derive pairs of internal parameters that satisfy the musical-noise-free condition by analysis based on higher-order statistics. It is clarified that finding a fixed point in the kurtosis of noise spectra enables the reproduction of the musical-noise-free state, and comparative experiments with commonly used noise reduction methods show the efficacy of the proposed method.