A dissonant frequency filtering for enhanced clarity of husky voice signals

In general, added noise in clean signal reduces intelligibility and degrades the performance of speech processing algorithms used for the applications such as speech compression and recognition In this paper, a new voice clarity enhancing method using a dissonant frequency filtering (DFF) (especially C # and F # in each octave band when reference frequency is C) combined with noise suppression (NS) is proposed The proposed method targets for speakers whose intelligibility became worse than normal under both noisy and noiseless environments. The test results indicate that the proposed method provides a significant audible improvement for speakers whose intelligibility is impaired and especially for the speech contaminated by the colored noise Therefore when the filter is employed as a pre-filter for enhancing the clarity of husky voice where several types of noises are also exploited, the output speech quality and clarity can be greatly enhanced.