TAO Zhi1,2 ZHAO Heming2 WU Di1 CHEN Daqing1 ZHANG Xiaojun1

(1　  School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University Suzhou 215006)

(2　　School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Soochow University Suzhou 215006)

Received Aug. 25, 2009

Revised Sept. 15, 2009

Abstract  Whispered speech enhancement using auditory masking model in modified Mel-domain and speech Absence Probability(SAP)was proposed. In light of the phonation characteristic of whisper, we modify the Melfrequency 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 whispered speech enhancement is conducted by adaptively rectifying the spectrum subtraction coefficients using different masking threshold values. Results of objective and subjective tests on the enhanced whispered signal show that compared with other methods; the proposed method can enhance whispered signal with better subjective auditory quality and less distrortion by reducing the music noise and background noise under the masking threshold value.

PACS numbers: 43.60,43.70