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A New Biologically Inspired Fuzzy Expert System-Based Voiced/Unvoiced Decision Algorithm for Speech Enhancement

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement approach for a single-microphone system. The main idea is to apply a specific transformation on the speech signal depending on the voicing state of the signal. We apply a voiced/unvoiced algorithm based on the multi-scale product analysis with the use of fuzzy logic to make more cognitively inspired use of speech information. A comb filtering is applied on the voiced frames of the noisy speech signal, and a spectral subtraction is operated on the unvoiced frames of the same signal. Further, the harmonics are enhanced by performing a designed comb filtering using an adjustable bandwidth. The comb filter is tuned by an accurate fundamental frequency estimation method. The fundamental frequency estimation method is based on computing the multi-scale product analysis of the noisy speech. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of reducing noise in adverse noise environments with little speech degradation and outperforms several competitive methods.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. A. Abel for his help throughout the revision of paper by her thesis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National School of Engineers of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia

    M. A. Ben Messaoud, A. Bouzid & N. Ellouze

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  1. M. A. Ben Messaoud
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  2. A. Bouzid
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  3. N. Ellouze
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Correspondence to M. A. Ben Messaoud.

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M. A. Ben Messaoud, A. Bouzid and N. Ellouze declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5). Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for which identifying information is included in this article.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by the any of the authors.

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Ben Messaoud, M.A., Bouzid, A. & Ellouze, N. A New Biologically Inspired Fuzzy Expert System-Based Voiced/Unvoiced Decision Algorithm for Speech Enhancement. Cogn Comput 8, 478–493 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-015-9376-2

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