An iterative longest matching segment approach to speech enhancement with additive noise and channel distortion

• Speech enhancement with both additive noise and channel distortion.
• Use of corpus data to reduce uncertainty of speech to be estimated.
• Use of corpus data to reduce training and testing data mismatch for speech recognition.
• An iterative algorithm to improve speech estimate.
• Improved results on Aurora 4 for speech recognition and speech enhancement.

This paper presents a new approach to speech enhancement from single-channel measurements involving both noise and channel distortion (i.e., convolutional noise), and demonstrates its applications for robust speech recognition and for improving noisy speech quality. The approach is based on finding longest matching segments (LMS) from a corpus of clean, wideband speech. The approach adds three novel developments to our previous LMS research. First, we address the problem of channel distortion as well as additive noise. Second, we present an improved method for modeling noise for speech estimation. Third, we present an iterative algorithm which updates the noise and channel estimates of the corpus data model. In experiments using speech recognition as a test with the Aurora 4 database, the use of our enhancement approach as a preprocessor for feature extraction significantly improved the performance of a baseline recognition system. In another comparison against conventional enhancement algorithms, both the PESQ and the segmental SNR ratings of the LMS algorithm were superior to the other methods for noisy speech enhancement.