Intelligibility Enhancement Based on Mutual Information

Seyran Khademi*, Richard C. Hendriks, W. Bastiaan Kleijn

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Speech intelligibility enhancement is considered for multiple-microphone acquisition and single loudspeaker rendering. This is based on the mutual information measured between the message spoken at far-end environment and the message perceived by a listener at near-end. We prove that the joint optimal processing can be decomposed into far-end and near-end processing. The former is a minimum variance distortionless response beamformer that reduces the noise in the talker environment and the latter is a post-filter that redistributes the power over the frequency bands. Disjoint processing is optimal provided that the post-filtering operation is aware of the residual noise from the beamforming operation. Our results show that both processing steps are necessary for the effective conveyance of a message and, importantly, that the second step must be aware of the remaining noise from the beamforming operation in the first step. In addition, we study the use of the mutual information applied on the perceptually more relevant powers per critical band.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7946152
Pages (from-to)1694-1708
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE - ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Volume25
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer
  • mutual information
  • multi-microphone
  • speech intelligibility enhancement

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