Binary Mask for Speech Enhancement

This paper is based on general principle of ideal binary masking. To Improve Intelligibility of the speech Ideal binary masking is used based on noise distortion constraints. A binary mask is designed to retain noise overestimated T-F units while discarding noise underestimated T-F units. Listening tests were conducted to evaluate the new binary mask in terms of intelligibility. An ideal binary mask is a priori defined as a binary matrix where 1 indicates that the target is stronger than the interference within the corresponding time- frequency unit and 0 indicates otherwise. Missing feature methods have been shown to be very successful at compensating for the effects of stationary and non-stationary noise when this mask is computed from a priori knowledge of the SNR of all spectrographic components. Our study, thus, demonstrates that the use of binary masking represents a promising direction for speech enhancement.