Selective Frequency Enhancement of Speech Signal for Intelligibility Improvement in Presence of Near-end Noise

In mobile phones, perceived speech signal deteriorates significantly in the presence of background noise as noise reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is an inherent need to increase the intelligibility of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithm at the receiverend. This paper focus on the enhancement of selective speech samples for the intelligibility improvement, when the near-end noise dominates. Audible speech samples are selected by consideringthreshold of hearing and auditory masking properties of the human ear. Intelligibility of enhanced speech signalis measured using Speech Intelligibility Index. Experimental results show the intelligibility improvement of the speech signal in lower SNR with the proposed approach to the unprocessed far-end speech signal. This approach is efficient in overcoming the degradation of speech signals in very noisy environments.