Joint Time-Varying Filtering and Masking for Speech Enhancement

In this paper, a speech enhancement method combining the robust time-varying filtering algorithm with time-frequency mask is proposed. Firstly, in the timefrequency distribution of the noisy speech signal, a series of image processing methods are exploited to acquire the initial instantaneous frequency information of the signal. Next, based on the instantaneous frequency information, the reconstructed speech signal with less noise is obtained via the robust time-varying filtering algorithm. Finally, we predict the time-frequency mask by utilizing the energy distribution of the reconstructed signal. The mask can efficiently keep speech information and suppress the noise in the time-frequency domain, which is used to enhance the speech signal. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with some conventional speech enhancement methods, and results in terms of different evaluation metrics demonstrate that the proposed speech enhancement method is effective in suppressing background noise and improving the overall quality of speech, especially in low SNR environments.