An MTF-based method of blind restoration for improving intelligibility of bone-conducted speech

概要

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Bone-conducted (BC) speech is useful for speech communications in extremely noisy environments. However, both the sound quality and intelligibility of BC speech are very poor. We propose a method of blind restoration for improving BC speech based on the concept of the modulation transfer function (MTF). We investigated the relationship between thepower envelope of air-conducted (AC) and BC speech signals by analyzing an AC/BC database. We then modeled these relations by fitting some models to the MTF derived from the database. The best-fitted model had two parameters. The first was the gain factor and the second was the attenuation factor. We also propose a method of detennining the parameters of the model without AC speech. We evaluated the new method using SNR, correlation, MTF, PESQ, and LSD. The results revealed that the proposed approach could effectively and blindly restore BC speech.