Efficient Noise Estimation for Speech Enhancement in Wavelet Packet Transform

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest a noise estimation method for speech enhancement in nonstationary noisy environments. The proposed method consists of the following two main processes. First, in order to receive fewer affect of variable signals, a best fitting regression line is used, which is obtained by applying a least squares method to coefficient magnitudes in a node with a uniform wavelet packet transform. Next, in order to update the noise estimation efficiently, a differential forgetting factor and a correlation coefficient per subband are used, where subband is employed for applying the weighted value according to the change of signals. In particular, this method has the ability to update the noise estimation by using the estimated noise at the previous frame only, without utilizing the statistical information of long past frames and explicit nonspeech frames by voice activity detector. In objective assessments, it was observed that the performance of the proposed method was better than that of the compared (minima controlled recursive averaging, weighted average) methods. Furthermore, the method showed a reliable result even at low SNR.