Jacob Benesty Knihy

This handbook plays a fundamental role in sustainable progress in speech research and development. With an accessible format and with accompanying DVD-Rom, it targets three categories of readers: graduate students, professors and active researchers in academia, and engineers in industry who need to understand or implement some specific algorithms for their speech-related products. It is a superb source of application-oriented, authoritative and comprehensive information about these technologies, this work combines the established knowledge derived from research in such fast evolving disciplines as Signal Processing and Communications, Acoustics, Computer Science and Linguistics.

We divide the general problem into five basic categories depending on the number of microphones being used and whether the interframe or interband correlation is considered.

Though noise reduction and speech enhancement problems have been studied for at least five decades, advances in our understanding and the development of reliable algorithms are more important than ever, as they support the design of tailored solutions for clearly defined applications. In this work, the authors propose a conceptual framework that can be applied to the many different aspects of noise reduction, offering a uniform approach to monaural and binaural noise reduction problems, in the time domain and in the frequency domain, and involving a single or multiple microphones. Moreover, the derivation of optimal filters is simplified, as are the performance measures used for their evaluation.

We live in a noisy world! In all applications (telecommunications, hands-free communications, recording, human-machine interfaces, etc.) that require at least one microphone, the signal of interest is usually contaminated by noise and reverberation. As a result, the microphone signal has to be „cleaned“ with digital signal processing tools before it is played out, transmitted, or stored. This book is about speech enhancement. Different well-known and state-of-the-art methods for noise reduction, with one or multiple microphones, are discussed. By speech enhancement, we mean not only noise reduction but also dereverberation and separation of independent signals. These topics are also covered in this book. However, the general emphasis is on noise reduction because of the large number of applications that can benefit from this technology. The goal of this book is to provide a strong reference for researchers, engineers, and graduate students who are interested in the problem of signal and speech enhancement. To do so, we invited well-known experts to contribute chapters covering the state of the art in this focused field.