New speech harmonic structure measure and it application to post speech enhancement

This paper proposes a set of hierarchical harmonicities to analyze the harmonic structure of a speech signal. The high redundant harmonic structure in voiced speech makes the perception of speech more robust in noisy environments. It is possible to recover a distorted harmonic structure. The systematic information of harmonic structure is represented by a set of harmonicities, including grid, temporal, spectral and segmental harmonicities. By using this harmonic measure, the speech quality after performing the enhancement can be evaluated. It gives an indicator of whether the further enhancement is necessary. A post speech enhancement based on the reconstruction of harmonic structure is proposed to enhance the quality of voiced speech. The experiment shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.