Harmonic phase estimation in single-channel speech enhancement using von mises distribution and prior SNR

Abstract

In single-channel speech enhancement the spectral amplitude of the noisy signal is often modified while the noisy spectral phase is directly employed for signal reconstruction. Recently, additional improvement in speech enhancement performance has been reported when the noisy phase is modified. In this work, we propose a Bayesian estimator for phase of harmonics given the noisy speech. The proposed estimator relies on the fundamental frequency and the signal-to-noise ratio at harmonics. Throughout our experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed phase enhancement in comparison with the noisy phase, a benchmark and the clean phase as the upper-bound. The proposed method leads to joint improvement in quality and intelligibility at different SNRs and noise types.