Forward-backward minima controlled recursive averaging to speech enhancement

The performance of hearing aids would be seriously reduced by nonstationary noises. In this paper, forward-backward minima controlled recursive averaging is proposed to improve the speech intelligibility by reducing the components of nonstationary noises. A forward-backward estimation is developed to correctively track nonstationary noises, especially the beginning of nonstationary noises. To suppress these nonstationary noises, a log-spectral amplitude estimator was selected as the gain function and used to effectively estimate the power spectrum of the noises. Moreover, harmonic regeneration was integrated to reduce the overestimation of noises. The experimental results demonstrated that our approach is able to improve performance compared to previous approaches.