HMM-Based Cue Parameters Estimation for Speech Enhancement

In this paper, a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based cue parameters estimation method for single-channel speech enhancement is proposed, in which the cue parameters of binaural cue coding (BCC) are applied to single-channel speech enhancement system successfully. First, the clean speech and noise signals are considered as the left and right channels of stereo signal, respectively; and the noisy speech is treated as the down-mixed mono signal of BCC method. According to the clean speech and noise data set and the corresponding noisy speech data set, the clean cue parameters and pre-enhanced cue parameters are extracted, respectively. Then the cue HMM is trained offline, which exploits the a priori information about the clean cue parameters and the pre-enhanced cue parameters for speech enhancement. Next, using the trained cue HMM, the clean cue parameters are estimated from noisy speech online. Finally, following the synthesis principle of BCC cue parameters, the speech estimator is constructed for enhancing noisy speech. The test results demonstrate that, for the segmental signal-noise-ratio (SNR), the log spectral distortion and PESQ measures, the proposed method performs better than the reference methods.