In this paper, a bilateral spectrogram filtering (BSF)-based optimally modified log-spectral amplitude (OMLSA) estimator for single-channel speech enhancement is proposed, which can significantly improve the performance of OMLSA, especially in highly non-stationary noise environments, by taking advantage of bilateral filtering (BF), a widely used technology in image and visual processing, to preprocess the spectrogram of the noisy speech. BSF is capable of not only sharpening details, removing unwanted textures or background noise from the noisy speech spectrogram, but also preserving edges when considering a speech spectrogram as an image. The a posteriori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of OMLSA algorithm is estimated after applying BSF to the noisy speech. Besides, in order to reduce computing costs, a fast and accurate BF is adopted to reduce the algorithm complexity O(1) for each time-frequency bin. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with the original OMLSA and other classic denoising methods using various types of noise with different signal-to-noise ratios in terms of objective evaluation metrics such as segmental signal-to-noise ratio improvement and perceptual evaluation of speech quality. The results show the validity of the improved BSF-based OMLSA algorithm.
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