Preserving acoustic cues in Speech Denoising

HUGO L. RUFINER; LUIS F. ROCHA; JOHN C. GODDARD

Houston, Texas, USA

Congreso; 2nd Joint Meeting of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society And the Biomedical Engineering Society EMBS-BMES2002; 2002

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

RecentlY metbods for obtaining sparse representations of signals from overcomplete dictionaries have been studied and some interesting connections between them and biological sensor processing have been observed. Given that a representation of this type is designed lo have only a small number of coefficients different from zero, one might intuitively expect that they would also show a certain robustness to additive noise. In the present paper an example, using spech signals, is examined by comparing several denoising techniques, including a simple method proposed by the authors. The method maintains a sparse representation of the signal and is found to preserve important acoustic cues necessary for phoneme identification.