Speech Enhancement by using Ideal Binary Mask

Communication via speech is one of the essential functions of human beings. Humans possess varied ways to retrieve information from the outside world or to communicate with each other. Three most important sources of information are speech, images and written text. For many purposes, speech is more efficient and convenient way. Speech not only conveys linguistic contents, but also communicates other useful information like the mood of the speaker.In speech communication systems the quality and intelligibility of speech is most important for easy and accurate exchange of information. In realistic listening situations, speech is often contaminated by various types of background noise. The presence of background noise degrades the quality as well as intelligibility of speech.This degradation of speech by noise creates problems not only for just interpersonal communication but more serious problems in applications in which decision or control is made on the basis of speech signal. So, there is need to develop a new method for speech enhancement which will improve quality as well as intelligibility of the speech. This paper presents method of speech enhancement by using Ideal Binary Mask. This is a simple method for enhancing the speech with the objective to eliminate the additive noise present in speechsignal and restore the speech signal to its original form with improved quality as well as intelligibility of speech.