Speech Enhancement Using Masking of Noisy Power Estimates

Speech enhancement algorithm is proposed for various noise environments. It is based on calculating the ratio of the standard deviation (STD) of the noisy power spectrum in time-frequency bins to its normalized time-frequency average. If the ratio greater than the adaptive threshold, speech is considered to be present. Our adaptive algorithm tracks the threshold and controls the trade-off between residual noise and distortion. The algorithm has the advantages of simplicity and light computational load for estimating the noise. Specifically, this algorithm reduces the residual noise significantly, and is superior to conventional methods.