Speech Enhancement Using Phase‐Dependent A Priori SNR Estimator in Log‐Mel Spectral Domain

We propose a novel phase‐based method for single‐channel speech enhancement to extract and enhance the desired signals in noisy environments by utilizing the phase information. In the method, a phase‐dependent a priori signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) is estimated in the log‐mel spectral domain to utilize both the magnitude and phase information of input speech signals. The phase‐dependent estimator is incorporated into the conventional magnitude‐based decision‐directed approach that recursively computes the a priori SNR from noisy speech. Additionally, we reduce the performance degradation owing to the one‐frame delay of the estimated phase‐dependent a priori SNR by using a minimum mean square error (MMSE)‐based and maximum a posteriori (MAP)‐based estimator. In our speech enhancement experiments, the proposed phase‐dependent a priori SNR estimator is shown to improve the output SNR by 2.6 dB for both the MMSE‐based and MAP‐based estimator cases as compared to a conventional magnitude‐based estimator.