Real-time speech enhancement using optimised empirical mode decomposition and non-local means estimation

Abstract

In this study, the authors present a novel speech enhancement method by exploring the benefits of non-local means (NLM) estimation and optimised empirical mode decomposition (OEMD) adopting cubic-spline interpolation. The optimal parameters responsible for improving the performance are estimated using the path-finder algorithm. At first, the noisy speech signal is decomposed into many scaled signals called intrinsic-mode functions (IMFs) through the use of a temporary decomposition method is called sifting process in OEMD approach. The obtained IMFs are processed by NLM estimation technique in terms of non-local similarities present in each IMF, to reduce the ill-effects caused by interfering noise. The proposed NLM-based method is effective to eliminate the noise of less-frequency. Each IMF contains essential information about the signals, on some scale or frequency band. Field programmable gate array architecture is implemented on a Xilinx ISE 14.5 and the result of the proposed method offers good performance with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and low mean-square error compared to other approaches. The performance evolution is carried out for different speech signals taken from the TIMIT database and noises taken from the NOISEX-92 database in different SNR stages of 0, 5 and 10 dB, respectively.