Voice activity detection based on short-time energy and noise spectrum adaptation

On the basis of the short-time energy of speech signals and the efficient method of noise statistics adaptation estimation proposed by Sohn et al.(1998), a new highly robust voice activity detection (VAD) rule for any kind of environmental noise is proposed in this paper. The accurate recognition rate of the new method is about five percent higher than that of Sohn´s method on average, and also has the same merit of tracking the noise spectrum properly as in Sohn´s method. Simulation experiments show that the new method is an efficient and robust voice activity detector.