Speech enhancement based on modified Mel masking model and speech absence probability in whispers

A method of whispered speech enhancement using auditory masking model in modified Mel-domain and Speech Absence Probability(SAP) is proposed.In light of the phonation characteristic of whispered speech,we modify the Mel Frequency Scaling model.Whispered speech is filtered by the proposed model.Meanwhile,the value of masking threshold for each frequency band is dynamically determined by speech absence probability.Then whisper speech enhancement is conducted by adaptively rectifying the spectrum subtraction coefficients using different masking threshold values.Resultsof objective and subjective tests on the enhanced whispered speech signal show that compared with other methods,the proposed method can enhance whispered speech signal with better subjective auditory quality and less distortion by reducing the music noise and background noise under the masking threshold value.