Single channel speech enhancement using MMSE estimation of short-time modulation magnitude spectrum

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the enhancement of speech by applying MMSE short-time spectral magnitude estimation in the modulation domain. For this purpose, the traditional analysismodification- synthesis framework is extended to include modulation domain processing. We compensate the noisy modulation spectrum for additive noise distortion by applying the MMSE short-time spectral magnitude estimation algorithm in the modulation domain. Subjective experiments were conducted to compare the quality of stimuli processed by the MMSE modulation magnitude estimator to those processed using the MMSE acoustic magnitude estimator and the modulation spectral subtraction method. The proposed method is shown to have better noise suppression than MMSE acoustic magnitude estimation, and improved speech quality compared to modulation domain spectral subtraction.