Multichannel speech enhancement systems (MSES') have been widely utilized for diverse types of speech interface applications. A state-of-the-art MSES primarily utilizes multichannel minima-controlled recursive averaging for noise estimations and a parameterized multichannel Wiener filter for noise reduction. Many MSES' are implemented in the frequency domain, but they are computationally burdensome due to the numerous complex matrix operations involved. In this paper, a novel MSES intended to reduce the computational complexity with improved performance is proposed. The proposed system is implemented in the mel-filterbank domain using a frequency-averaging technique. Through a performance evaluation, it is verified that the proposed mel-filterbank MSES achieves improvements in the perceptual speech quality with a reduced level of computation compared to a conventional MSES.

An efficient noise reduction algorithm is proposed to improve speech recognition performance for human machine interfaces. In the algorithm, a probabilistic adaptation mode controller (AMC) is designed and adopted to the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC). To detect target speech intervals, the proposed AMC calculates the inter-channel correlation and estimates speech absence probability (SAP). Based on the SAP, the adaptation mode of the adaptive filter in the GSC is decided. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm significantly improves speech recognition performances and signal-to-noise ratios in real noisy environments.