Two-stage binaural speech enhancement with Wiener filter for high-quality speech communication

Speech enhancement has been researched extensively for many years to provide high-quality speech communication in the presence of background noise and concurrent interference signals. Human listening is robust against these acoustic interferences using only two ears, but state-of-the-art two-channel algorithms function poorly. Motivated by psychoacoustic studies of binaural hearing (equalization-cancellation (EC) theory), in this paper, we propose a two-stage binaural speech enhancement with Wiener filter (TS-BASE/WF) approach that is a two-input two-output system. In this proposed TS-BASE/WF, interference signals are first estimated by equalizing and cancelling the target signal in a way inspired by the EC theory, a time-variant Wiener filter is then applied to enhance the target signal given the noisy mixture signals. The main advantages of the proposed TS-BASE/WF are (1) effectiveness in dealing with non-stationary multiple-source interference signals, and (2) success in preserving binaural cues after processing. These advantages were confirmed according to the comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations in different acoustical spatial configurations in terms of speech enhancement and binaural cue preservation. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.