Fundamentals of Speech Enhancement

This book presents and develops several important concepts of speech enhancement in a simple but rigorous way. Many of the ideas are new; not only do they shed light on this old problem but they also offer valuable tips on how to improve on some well-known conventional approaches. The book unifies all aspects of speech enhancement, from single channel, multichannel, beamforming, time domain, frequency domain and time–frequency domain, to binaural in a clear and flexible framework. It starts with an exhaustive discussion on the fundamental best (linear and nonlinear) estimators, showing how they are connected to various important measures such as the coefficient of determination, the correlation coefficient, the conditional correlation coefficient, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It then goes on to show how to exploit these measures in order to derive all kinds of noise reduction algorithms that can offer an accurate and versatile compromise between noise reduction and speech distortion.

Jacob Benesty received his Master’s degree in Microwaves from Pierre & Marie Curie University, France, in 1987, and his Ph.D. in Control and Signal Processing from Orsay University, France, in 1991. From January 1994 to July 1995, he worked at Telecom Paris University, France, on multichannel adaptive filters and acoustic echo cancellation. From October 1995 to May 2003, he was first a consultant and then a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey (NJ), USA. In May 2003, he joined the University of Quebec, INRS-EMT, in Montreal, Canada, as a professor. His research interests include signal processing, acoustic signal processing, and multimedia communications. Dr Benesty received the 2001 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has co-authored multiple books with Springer and is the series editor for the “Springer Topics in Signal Processing”.