Perceptual subspace speech enhancement using variance of the reconstruction error

In this paper, a new signal subspace-based approach for enhancing a speech signal degraded by environmental noise is presented. The Perceptual Karhunen–Loève Transform (PKLT) method is improved here by including the Variance of the Reconstruction Error (VRE) criterion, in order to optimize the subspace decomposition model. The incorporation of the VRE in the PKLT (namely the PKLT-VRE hybrid method) yields a good tradeoff between the noise reduction and the speech distortion thanks to the combination of a perceptual criterion and the optimal determination of the noisy subspace dimension. In adverse conditions, the experimental tests, using objective quality measures, show that the proposed method provides a higher noise reduction and a lower signal distortion than the existing speech enhancement techniques.