The unimportance of phase in speech enhancement

The importance of Fourier transform phase in speech enhancement is considered. Results indicate that a more accurate estimation of phase is unwarranted in speech enhancement at the S/N ratios where the intelligibility scores of unprocessed speech range from 5 to 95 percent, if the phase estimate is used to reconstruct speech by combining it with an independently estimated magnitude or to reconstruct speech using the phase-only signal reconstruction algorithm.