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A Speech Enhancement Method for Improved Intelligibility in the Presence of an Ambient Noise

A speech enhancement method for the improvement of speech intelligibility in the presence of a background noise was developed and tested. The enhancement method is based on psychoacoustic criteria. The Auditory Masking Threshold (AMT) of noise was calculated and used to extract information about the spectral components of speech, which don’t mask the noise and thus, are not audible. Only these inaudible components of speech were enhanced. Since the method modifies the spectral components of speech in an adaptive way, and only within a small number of selected frequency bands, the distortion of the original acoustic features of speech is minimal. Numerical simulations of the enhancement process were performed and tested using the subjective Modified Rhyme Test (MRT). The results of the MRT were analyzed statistically with respect to the subjects’ scores and with respect to the word sets scores. A statistically significant improvement of speech intelligibility was observed.