Speech Enhancement Using Harmonic Regeneration

The paper addresses the problem of single microphone speech enhancement in noisy environments. Common short-time noise reduction techniques introduce harmonic distortion in enhanced speech because of the non reliability of estimators for small signal-to-noise ratios. We propose a new method, called harmonic regeneration noise reduction technique, which solves this problem. A fully harmonic signal is calculated based on the distorted signal using a non-linearity to regenerate harmonics in an efficient way. This artificial signal is then used to compute a suppression gain able to preserve the speech harmonics. This method is theoretically analyzed, then objective and formal subjective results are given and show a significant improvement compared to classical noise reduction techniques.