Noise reduction algorithm with the soft thresholding based on the Shannon entropy and bone-conduction speech cross- correlation bands

Technol Health Care. 2018;26(S1):281-289. doi: 10.3233/THC-174615.

Abstract

Background: The conventional methods of speech enhancement, noise reduction, and voice activity detection are based on the suppression of noise or non-speech components of the target air-conduction signals. However, air-conduced speech is hard to differentiate from babble or white noise signals.

Objective: To overcome this problem, the proposed algorithm uses the bone-conduction speech signals and soft thresholding based on the Shannon entropy principle and cross-correlation of air- and bone-conduction signals.

Methods: A new algorithm for speech detection and noise reduction is proposed, which makes use of the Shannon entropy principle and cross-correlation with the bone-conduction speech signals to threshold the wavelet packet coefficients of the noisy speech.

Results: The proposed method can be get efficient result by objective quality measure that are PESQ, RMSE, Correlation, SNR.

Conclusion: Each threshold is generated by the entropy and cross-correlation approaches in the decomposed bands using the wavelet packet decomposition. As a result, the noise is reduced by the proposed method using the MATLAB simulation. To verify the method feasibility, we compared the air- and bone-conduction speech signals and their spectra by the proposed method. As a result, high performance of the proposed method is confirmed, which makes it quite instrumental to future applications in communication devices, noisy environment, construction, and military operations.

Keywords: Noise reduction; Shannon entropy; bone conduction; speech.

MeSH terms

  • Bone Conduction / physiology*
  • Entropy
  • Hearing Loss / rehabilitation
  • Humans
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*
  • Signal-To-Noise Ratio
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Speech*
  • Wavelet Analysis*