A novel psychoacoustically motivated audio enhancement algorithm preserving background noise characteristics

In this paper we propose an algorithm for reduction of noise in audio signals. In contrast to several previous approaches we do not try to achieve a complete removal of the noise, but instead our goal is to preserve a pre-defined amount of the original noise in the processed signal. This is accomplished by exploiting the masking properties of the human auditory system. The speech and noise distortions are considered separately. The spectral weighting rule, adapted by utilizing only estimates of the masking threshold and the noise power spectral density, has been designed to guarantee complete masking of distortions of the residual noise. Simulation results confirm that no audible artifacts are left in the processed signal, while speech distortions are comparable to those caused by conventional noise reduction techniques. Audio demonstrations are available from http://www.ind.rwth-aachen.de.