9 accepted papers
Occluding the ear canal alters the perception of the own voice. This is called the occlusion effect. Low frequency components of the own voice are amplified and high frequency components are attenuated. In this contribution, we extend our previously published Active Occlusion Cancellation (AOC) syst…
Algorithms for Near-End Listening Enhancement (NELE) improve the intelligibility of speech from the far-end, played back in a near-end noisy environment, by adaptively filtering the speech signal and taking into account the near-end background noise characteristics. In contrast to previous works, th…
In studies on artificial bandwidth extension (ABE), there is a lack of international coordination in subjective tests between multiple methods and languages. Here we present the design of absolute category rating listening tests evaluating 12 ABE variants of six approaches in multiple languages, nam…
A drawback of digital transmission of analog signals is the unavoidable quantization error which leads to a limited quality even for good channel conditions. This saturation can be avoided by using analog transmission systems with discrete-time and quasi-continuous-amplitude encoding and decoding, e…
In announcement and communication systems, clean speech is often played back by loudspeakers in the presence of local background noise which decreases intelligibility. Speech reinforcement is a technique that enhances the intelligibility by adaptively filtering the speech, usually based on measured…
A novel noise power spectral density (PSD) estimator for disturbed speech signals which operates in the short-time Fourier domain is presented. A noise PSD estimate is provided by constrained tracing with time of the noisy observation separately for each frequency bin. The constraint is a limitation…
In this paper, a novel noise-shaping method for Multi-Channel Linear Prediction (MCLP) is presented. Without special consideration, the quantization noise of the prediction error poses a serious problem in multi-channel prediction as each noise component distorts the reconstruction of every channel…
A novel noise-robust soft Voice Activity Detector (VAD) operating in the short-time Fourier domain is presented. A speech energy gain is obtained by frame-wise processing of a noisy speech signal with a speech codebook algorithm. This gain can be used for robust voice detection. A speaker-independen…
This paper presents a method to enhance a speech signal disturbed by wind noise. The wind noise is generated by turbulences in an air stream close to the microphone which picks up the desired speech signal. As the majority of speech enhancement algorithms works in the frequency domain, the short ter…