A method of whispered speech enhancement based on speech absence probability and modified mel-domain masking model

Whispered speech enhancement using auditory masking model in modified Meldomain and Speech Absence Probability(SAP)was proposed.In light of the phonation characteristic of whisper,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 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 distortion by reducing the music noise and background noise under the masking threshold value.