Abstract: Aimed to reach a compromise between noise suppression and speech distortion,an adaptiveβ-order perceptually motivated speech enhancement algorithm based on frequency-domain auditory masking to improve speech enhancement performance is proposed.The algorithm applies auditory masking effect.Theβvalue in the algorithm is adjusted adaptively according to the calculated frequency-domain masking threshold so that the noise is suppressed just under the threshold.In this way,the algorithm could maintain more speech information and reduce speech distortion. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by subjective and objective measurements respectively,and was compared to that of adaptiveβ-order perceptually motivated speech enhancement algorithm based on signal to noise ratio.Resultsshowed that when the SNR is between—10 dB and 5 dB the objective measurement results of the adaptiveβ-order perceptually motivated speech enhancement algorithm based on frequency-domain auditory masking is higher than that of the comparing algorithm.Subjective measurement results also showed that the adaptiveβ-order perceptually motivated speech enhancement algorithm based on frequency-domain auditory masking can suppress background noise well while saving speech information as much as possible.