Spectral subtraction based on non-extensive statistics for speech recognition

Abstract

Spectral subtraction (SS) is an additive noise removal method which is derived in an extensive framework. In spectral subtraction, it is assumed that speech and noise spectra follow Gaussian distributions and are independent with each other. Hence, noisy speech also follows a Gaussian distribution. Spectral subtraction formula is obtained by maximizing the likelihood of noisy speech distribution with respect to its variance. However, it is well known that noisy speech observed in real situations often follows a heavy-tailed distribution, not a Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we introduce a q-Gaussian distribution in the non-extensive statistics to represent the distribution of noisy speech and derive a new spectral subtraction method based on it. We found that the q-Gaussian distribution fits the noisy speech distribution better than the Gaussian distribution does. Our speech recognition experiments using the Aurora-2 database showed that the proposed method, q-spectral subtraction (q-SS), outperformed the conventional SS method. Copyright © 2013 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.