Two-microphone binary mask speech enhancement in diffuse and directional noise fields

Abstract

Two-microphone binary mask speech enhancement (2mBMSE) has been of particular interest in recent literature and has shown promising results. Current 2mBMSE systems rely on spatial cues of speech and noise sources. Although these cues are helpful for directional noise sources, they lose their efficiency in diffuse noise fields. We propose a new system that is effective in both directional and diffuse noise conditions. The system exploits two features. The first determines whether a given time-frequency (T-F) unit of the input spectrum is dominated by a diffuse or directional source. A diffuse signal is certainly a noise signal, but a directional signal could correspond to a noise or speech source. The second feature discriminates between T-F units dominated by speech or directional noise signals. Speech enhancement is performed using a binary mask, calculated based on the proposed features. In both directional and diffuse noise fields, the proposed system segregates speech T-F units with hit rates above 85%. It outperforms previous solutions in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and perceptual evaluation of speech quality improvement, especially in diffuse noise conditions.