Noisy speech enhancement based on an adaptive threshold and a modified hard thresholding function in wavelet packet domain

This paper proposes a speech enhancement approach, which statistically determines an adaptive threshold using the Teager energy operated WP coefficients of noisy speech. The obtained threshold is employed upon the WP coefficients of the noisy speech by employing a modified hard thresholding function. Extensive simulations in the presence of different noises indicate that this new method is very effective for both white noise and color noise reduction from speech, resulting in enhanced speech with better speech quality. Several standard objective measures and subjective observations show that the proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-art thresholding based approaches from high to low level SNRs. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.