A Psychoacoustic Noise Reduction Method by Auditory Inhibition

An auditory-motivated noise reduction methodology is proposed based on the inhibitory property of the human auditory system. The proposed psychoacoustic spectral subtraction method utilizes non-linearly and spatially distributed inhibitory weights which are determined based on the critical bands of the auditory system. Moreover, the weights are adjusted based on the segmental a posteriori SNR, such that higher inhibition is applied to the more noisy segments. Spurious noise perturbation in the vicinity of the dominant peaks are suppressed by the inhibitory spectral subtraction which improves speech degraded by additive and musical noise. The performance of the proposed psychoacoustic noise suppression method was evaluated by two perceptual test measures, PESQ and PEMO-Q using TIMIT utterances in clean and noise conditions, and shown to achieve better PESQ scores over the spectral subtraction method. It is further shown that by combining the proposed inhibitory weighting technique with the spectral subtraction method, higher performance benchmark in both PESQ and PEMOQ may be obtained.