A priori SNR estimation and noise estimation for speech enhancement

A priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation and noise estimation are important for speech enhancement. In this paper, a novel modified decision-directed (DD) a priori SNR estimation approach based on single-frequency entropy, named DDBSE, is proposed. DDBSE replaces the fixed weighting factor in the DD approach with an adaptive one calculated according to change of single-frequency entropy. Simultaneously, a new noise power estimation approach based on unbiased minimum mean square error (MMSE) and voice activity detection (VAD), named UMVAD, is proposed. UMVAD adopts different strategies to estimate noise in order to reduce over-estimation and under-estimation of noise. UMVAD improves the classical statistical model-based VAD by utilizing an adaptive threshold to replace the original fixed one and modifies the unbiased MMSE-based noise estimation approach using an adaptive a priori speech presence probability calculated by entropy instead of the original fixed one. Experimental results show that DDBSE can provide greater noise suppression than DD and UMVAD can improve the accuracy of noise estimation. Compared to existing approaches, speech enhancement based on UMVAD and DDBSE can obtain a better segment SNR score and composite measure c_ovl score, especially in adverse environments such as non-stationary noise and low-SNR.