F0-Based Gammatone Filtering for Intelligibility Gain of Acoustic Noisy Signals

This letter proposes a time-domain method to improve speech intelligibility in noisy scenarios. In the proposed approach, a series of Gammatone filters are adopted to detect the harmonic components of speech. The filters outputs are amplified to emphasize the first harmonics, reducing the masking ef...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE signal processing letters 2021, Vol.28, p.1225-1229
Main Authors: Queiroz, A., Coelho, R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Background noise
Estimation
Gain
Gammatone filtering
Harmonic analysis
Harmonics
Intelligibility
intelligibility improvement
Noise measurement
Non-stationary noises
Power harmonic filters
Signal to noise ratio
Speech
Speech processing
Time domain analysis
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Summary:This letter proposes a time-domain method to improve speech intelligibility in noisy scenarios. In the proposed approach, a series of Gammatone filters are adopted to detect the harmonic components of speech. The filters outputs are amplified to emphasize the first harmonics, reducing the masking effects of acoustic noises. The proposed GTF_\text{F0} solution and two baseline techniques are examined considering four background noises with different non-stationarity degrees. Three intelligibility measures (ESTOI, ESII and ASII_{\text{ST}}) are adopted for objective evaluation. The experiments results show that the proposed scheme leads to expressive speech intelligibility gain when compared to the competing approaches. Furthermore, the PESQ and OQCM objective scores demonstrate that the proposed technique also provides interesting quality improvement.
ISSN:1070-9908
1558-2361
DOI:10.1109/LSP.2021.3084561