Single-channel speech enhancement in a transient noise environment by exploiting speech harmonicity

This paper focuses on the problem of single-channel noise reduction in a transient noise environment for speech enhancement application. A typical speech enhancement algorithm requires an estimate of the noise statistics. However, the problem of noise estimation is challenging when the statistics of the noise vary significantly with time. By exploiting the fact that for speech signal most of the energy is concentrated on the harmonic bands in voiced frames, we propose an algorithm for the estimation of speech presence probability in the time-frequency domain. The estimated speech presence probability is then used for noise estimation for speech enhancement application. Evaluations are conducted to compare the speech enhancement performance between the proposed algorithm and the existing algorithm for various types of transient noise.