A novel psychoacoustically motivated multi-channel speech enhancement system

The ubiquitous noise reduction / speech enhancement problem has gained an increasing interest in recent years. This is due both to progress made by microphone-array systems and to the successful introduction of perceptual models. In the last decade, several methods incorporating psychoacoustic criteria in single channel speech enhancement systems have been proposed, however very few works exploit these features in the multichannel case. In this paper we present a novel psychoacoustically motivated, multichannel speech enhancement system that exploits spatial information and psychoacoustic concepts. The proposed framework offers enhanced flexibility allowing for a multitude of perceptually-based post-filtering solutions. Moreover, the system has been devised on a frame-by-frame basis to facilitate real-time implementation. Objective performance measures and informal subjective listening tests for the case of speech signals corrupted with real car and F-16 cockpit noise demonstrate enhanced performance of the proposed speech enhancement system in terms of musical residual noise reduction compared to conventional multichannel techniques.