A semisoft thresholding method based on Teager energy operation on wavelet packet coefficients for enhancing noisy speech

Abstract

The performance of thresholding-based methods for speech enhancement largely depends upon the estimation of the exact threshold value. In this paper, a new thresholding-based speech enhancement approach, where the threshold is statistically determined using the Teager energy-operated wavelet packet (WP) coefficients of noisy speech, is proposed. The threshold thus obtained is applied to the WP coefficients of the noisy speech by employing a semisoft thresholding function in order to obtain an enhanced speech. A number of simulations were carried out in the presence of white, car, pink, and multi-talker babble noises to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Standard objective measures as well as subjective evaluations show that the proposed method is capable of outperforming the existing state-of-the-art thresholding-based speech enhancement approaches for noisy speech of high as well as low levels of SNR. © 2013 Sanam and Shahnaz; licensee Springer.