Single channel noise reduction system in low SNR

We propose a two stage noise reduction system for reducing background noise using single-microphone recordings in very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based on Wiener filtering and ideal binary masking. The proposed system contains two stages. In first stage, the Wiener filtering with improved a priori SNR is applied to noisy speech for background noise reduction. In second stage, the ideal binary mask is estimated at every time–frequency channel by using pre-processed first stage speech and comparing the time–frequency channels against a pre-selected threshold T to reduce the residual noise. The time–frequency channels satisfying the threshold are preserved whereas all other time–frequency channels are attenuated. The results revealed substantial improvements in speech intelligibility and quality over that accomplished with the traditional noise reduction algorithms and unprocessed speech.