Single-Channel Speech Enhancement Based on Psychoacoustic Masking

This paper addresses the problem of single-channel speech enhancement based on masking properties of the human auditory system. A complete implementation of speech enhancement using psychoacoustic masking based on a suggestion of Virag [1] is presented in this paper. Essential features have been improved by modifying simultaneous masking and introducing temporal masking in the proposed algorithm. The noise masking threshold is calculated by considering simultaneous masking as well as temporal masking, and then it is used to adapt the subtraction parameters to obtain the best tradeoff between the amount of noise reduction, the speech distortion, and the level of residual noise in a perceptual sense. The application of objective measures and subjective listening tests demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms comparable speech enhancement algorithms.