A subspace approach based on embedded prewhitening for voice activity detection

Abstract

This paper presents a subspace approach for voice activity detection (VAD). The proposed approach is based on an embedded prewhitening scheme for the simultaneous diagonalization of the clean speech and noise covariance matrices to provide a decision rule based on likelihood ratio test in signal subspace domain. Experimental results show that the proposed subspace-based VAD algorithm outperforms the method using a Gaussian model in a conventional discrete Fourier transform domain at the low signal-to-noise conditions. (C) 2011 Acoustical Society of America