| Abstract: | This paper describes an algorithm to suppress composite noise in a two‐microphone speech enhancement system for robust hands‐free speech communication. The proposed algorithm has four stages. The first stage estimates the power spectral density of the residual stationary noise, which is based on the detection of nonstationary signal‐dominant time‐frequency bins (TFBs) at the generalized sidelobe canceller output. Second, speech‐dominant TFBs are identified among the previously detected nonstationary signal‐dominant TFBs, and power spectral densities of speech and residual nonstationary noise are estimated. In the final stage, the bin‐wise output signal‐to‐noise ratio is obtained with these power estimates and a Wiener post‐filter is constructed to attenuate the residual noise. Compared to the conventional beamforming and post‐filter algorithms, the proposed speech enhancement algorithm shows significant performance improvement in terms of perceptual evaluation of speech quality. |
