Speech Enhancement of Mobile Devices Based on the Integration of a Dual Microphone Array and a Background Noise Elimination Algorithm

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 18; no. 5; p. 1467
• Main Author: Chen, Yung-Yue
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 08.05.2018; MDPI
• Subjects: Algorithms; background noise reduction; estimator design; mobile device; Speech; speech enhancement; mobile device; estimator design; speech enhancement; background noise reduction
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s18051467

Mobile devices are often used in our daily lives for the purposes of speech and communication. The speech quality of mobile devices is always degraded due to the environmental noises surrounding mobile device users. Regretfully, an effective background noise reduction solution cannot easily be developed for this speech enhancement problem. Due to these depicted reasons, a methodology is systematically proposed to eliminate the effects of background noises for the speech communication of mobile devices. This methodology integrates a dual microphone array with a background noise elimination algorithm. The proposed background noise elimination algorithm includes a whitening process, a speech modelling method and an H2 estimator. Due to the adoption of the dual microphone array, a low-cost design can be obtained for the speech enhancement of mobile devices. Practical tests have proven that this proposed method is immune to random background noises, and noiseless speech can be obtained after executing this denoise process.