Impulsive Noise Detection for Speech Enhancement in HHT Domain

This paper introduces a novel single channel speech enhancement method in the time domain to mitigate the effects of acoustic impulsive noises. The ensemble empirical mode decomposition is applied to analyze the noisy speech signal. The estimation and selection of noise components is based on the impulsiveness index of decomposition modes. An adaptive threshold is proposed to define the criterion to select the noise components. The proposed method is evaluated in speech enhancement experiments considering four acoustic noises with different impulsiveness indices and non-stationarity degrees under various signal-to-noise ratios. Four speech enhancement algorithms are adopted as baseline in the evaluation analysis considering spectral and time domains. Seven objective measures are adopted to compare the proposed and baseline approaches in terms of speech quality and intelligibility. Results show that the proposed solution outperforms the competing algorithms for most of the noisy scenarios. The novel method shows particularly interesting performance when speech signals are corrupted by highly impulsive acoustic noises.