This paper proposes gain relaxation in signal enhancement designed for speech recognition. Gain relaxation selectively applies softer enhancement of a target signal to eliminate potential degradation in speech recognition caused by small undesirable distortion in the target signal components. The softer enhancement is a solution to overlooked performance degradation in signal enhancement combined with speech recognition which is encountered in commercial products with an unaware small local noise source. Evaluation of directional interference suppression with signals recorded by a commercial PC (personal computer) demonstrates that signal enhancement over the input is achieved without sacrificing the performance for clean speech.

This paper proposes a directional noise suppressor with a specified constant beamwidth for directional interferences and diffuse noise. A directional gain is calculated based on interchannel phase difference and combined with a spectral gain commonly used in single-channel noise suppressors. The beamwidth can be specified as passband edges of the directional gain. In order to implement frequency-independent constant beamwidth, frequency-proportionate directional gains are defined for different frequencies as a constraint. Evaluation with signals recorded by a commercial PC demonstrates good agreement between the theoretical and the measured directivity. The signal-to-noise ratio improvement and the PESQ score for the enhanced signal are improved by 24.4dB and 0.3 over a conventional noise suppressor. In a speech recognition scenario, the proposed directional noise suppressor outperforms both the conventional nondirectional noise suppressor and the conventional directional noise suppressor based on phase based T/F filtering with a negligible degradation in the word error rate for clean speech.