Harmonic Detection From Noisy Speech With Auditory Frame Gain for Intelligibility Enhancement

This paper introduces a novel (HDAG - Harmonic Detection for Auditory Gain) method for speech intelligibility enhancement in noisy scenarios. In the proposed scheme, a series of selective Gammachirp filters are adopted to emphasize the harmonic components of speech reducing the masking effects of acoustic noises. The fundamental frequency values are estimated by the HHT-Amp (Amplitude-based Hilbert Huang Transform) technique. Harmonic components estimated with low accuracy are detected and adjusted according to the FSFFE (Frequency Separation for Fundamental Frequency Estimation) low/high pitch separation. The central frequencies of the filterbank are defined considering the third-octave subbands which are best suited to cover the regions most relevant to intelligibility. Before signal reconstruction, the gammachirp filtered components are amplified by gain factors regulated by FSFFE classification. The proposed HDAG solution and three baseline techniques are examined considering six background noises with four signal-to-noise ratios. Three objective measures are adopted for the evaluation of speech intelligibility and quality. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better speech intelligibility improvement when compared to the competing approaches. A perceptual listening test is further considered and corroborates the objective results.