Speech enhancement based on stationary bionic wavelet transform and maximum a posterior estimator of magnitude-squared spectrum

Numerous efforts have focused on the problem of reducing the impact of noise on the performance of various speech systems such as speech coding, speech recognition and speaker recognition. These approaches consider alternative speech features, improved speech modeling, or alternative training for acoustic speech models. In this paper, we propose a new speech enhancement technique, which integrates a new proposed wavelet transform which we call stationary bionic wavelet transform (SBWT) and the maximum a posterior estimator of magnitude-squared spectrum (MSS-MAP). The SBWT is introduced in order to solve the problem of the perfect reconstruction associated with the bionic wavelet transform. The MSS-MAP estimation was used for estimation of speech in the SBWT domain. The experiments were conducted for various noise types and different speech signals. The results of the proposed technique were compared with those of other popular methods such as Wiener filtering and MSS-MAP estimation in frequency domain. To test the performance of the proposed speech enhancement system, four objective quality measurement tests [signal to noise ratio (SNR), segmental SNR, Itakura–Saito distance and perceptual evaluation of speech quality] were conducted for various noise types and SNRs. Experimental results and objective quality measurement test results proved the performance of the proposed speech enhancement technique. It provided sufficient noise reduction and good intelligibility and perceptual quality, without causing considerable signal distortion and musical background noise. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.