Liu Hanjun, Zhao Qin, Wan Mingxi, Wang Supin
Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2006 May;53(5):865-74. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2006.872821.
Electrolarynx (EL) speech provides a valuable means of verbal communication for the laryngectomees. Yet EL speech tends to be less intelligible speech due to the presence of background noise. This paper addresses the issue of EL speech enhancement. The proposed approach takes into account the frequency-domain masking properties of the human auditory system for a subtractive-type enhancement process. Subtractive-type algorithms can efficiently reduce the radiated noise of EL speech but not to reduce the additive noise from the environment due to the use of fixed subtraction parameters. Considering the particular characteristics of EL speech, a new computationally efficient algorithm based on the perceptual weighting technique is developed to adapt the subtraction parameters. This leads to a significant reduction of the unnatural structure of the residual noise. Acoustic and perceptual experiments confirm that the enhanced EL speech is more pleasant to human listeners and the proposed algorithm results in improved performance over classical subtractive-type algorithms.
电子喉（EL）语音为喉切除患者提供了一种宝贵的言语交流方式。然而，由于存在背景噪声，EL语音的可懂度往往较低。本文探讨了EL语音增强问题。所提出的方法在减法型增强过程中考虑了人类听觉系统的频域掩蔽特性。减法型算法可以有效地降低EL语音的辐射噪声，但由于使用固定的减法参数，无法降低来自环境的加性噪声。考虑到EL语音的特殊特性，开发了一种基于感知加权技术的新的计算效率高的算法来调整减法参数。这使得残余噪声的不自然结构显著降低。声学和感知实验证实，增强后的EL语音对人类听众来说更悦耳，并且所提出的算法比传统的减法型算法具有更好的性能。
