Extension of Pre-Image Speech De-Noising by Voice Activity Detection Using a Bone Conductive Microphone

Abstract:
In this paper, we use voice activity detection to improve the de-noising ability of the previously proposed pre-image iteration speech enhancement method. We use a speech database consisting of two-channel recordings where the audio signal is recorded by both a bone conductive microphone and a close-talking microphone. The bone channel is used for voice activity detection as it can be assumed to be robust against environmental noise. The pre-image iteration method is prone to residual noise around speech components – we use the voice activity detection to remove this noise. The approach is evaluated using objective quality measures of the PEASS toolbox and shows an increase of the de-noising capability compared to the original method. Index Terms — Speech de-noising, voice activity detection, bone conductive microphone, pre-image iterations, speech enhancement