Phase-sensitive speech enhancement for cochlear implant processing

• Published in: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 5104 - 5107
• Main Authors: Jafari, Pourya S., Hou-Yong Kang, Xiaosong Wang, Qian-Jie Fu, Hui Jiang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2011
• Subjects: cochlear implant; Cochlear implants; Estimation; log power spectral domain; Noise; Noise measurement; phase-sensitive model; relative phase; Speech; Speech enhancement; Speech recognition
• ISBN: 9781457705380; 1457705389
• ISSN: 1520-6149
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5947505

In this paper, we present a new approach to enhance noisy speech based on an environmental model incorporating the phase between noise and clean speech (often called phase-sensitive model) in log power spectral domain. Some previous phase-sensitive methods normally assume the phase factor to be a random variable or set it heuristically. In this work, we assume phase to be an unknown parameter that can be estimated deterministically from data and present an algorithm for its estimation. Words-in-sentences recognition by twelve cochlear implant subjects was tested under six different noisy listening conditions with and without the speech enhancement algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed phase-sensitive approach significantly improves the recognition of noisy speech and significantly outperforms other conventional phase insensitive methods in all listening conditions.