In this paper, a novel approach to speech reinforcement in a low-bit-rate speech coder under ambient noise environments is proposed. The excitation vector of ambient noise is efficiently obtained at the near-end and then combined with the excitation signal of the far-end for a suitable reinforcement gain within the G.729 CS-ACELP Annex. B framework. For this reason, this can be clearly different from previous approaches in that the present approach does not require an additional arithmetic step such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Experimental results indicate that the proposed method shows better performance than or at least comparable to conventional approaches with a lower computational burden.

In this letter, we propose a simple but effective technique that improves statistical model-based voice activity detection (VAD) by both reducing computational complexity and increasing detection accuracy. The improvements are made by applying Taylor series approximations to the exponential and logarithmic functions in the VAD algorithm based on an in-depth analysis of the algorithm. Experiments performed on a smartphone as well as on a desktop computer with various background noises confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

In this paper, we present a speech enhancement technique based on the ambient noise classification that incorporates the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). The principal parameters of the statistical model-based speech enhancement algorithm such as the weighting parameter in the decision-directed (DD) method and the long-term smoothing parameter of the noise estimation, are set according to the classified context to ensure best performance under each noise. For real-time context awareness, the noise classification is performed on a frame-by-frame basis using the GMM with the soft decision framework. The speech absence probability (SAP) is used in detecting the speech absence periods and updating the likelihood of the GMM.

In this letter, we propose a speech reinforcement technique based on soft decision under both the far-end and near-end noise environments. We amplify the estimated clean speech signal at the far-end based on the estimated ambient noise spectrum at the near-end, as opposed to reinforcing the noisy far-end speech signal, so that it can be heard more intelligibly in far-end noisy environments. To obtain an effective reinforcement technique, we adopt the soft decision scheme incorporating a speech absence probability (SAP) in the frequency dependent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) recovery method where the clean speech spectrum is estimated and the reinforcement gain is inherently derived and modified within the unified framework. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated by a subjective testing under various noisy environments. This is an improvement over previous approaches.

In this paper, we propose a spectral difference approach for noise power estimation in speech enhancement. The noise power estimate is given by recursively averaging past spectral power values using a smoothing parameter based on the current observation. The smoothing parameter in time and frequency is adjusted by the spectral difference between consecutive frames that can efficiently characterize noise variation. Specifically, we propose an effective technique based on a sigmoid-type function in order to adaptively determine the smoothing parameter based on the spectral difference. Compared to a conventional method, the proposed noise estimate is computationally efficient and able to effectively follow noise changes under various noise conditions.