Apparatus and Method for Processing an Audio Signal for
Speech Enhancement using a Feature Extraction
Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of audio signal
processing and, particularly, in the field of speech
enhancement of audio signals, so that a processed signal
has speech content, which has an improved objective or
subjective speech intelligibility.
Background of the Invention and Prior Art
Speech enhancement is applied in different applications. A
prominent application is the use of digital signal
processing in hearing aids. Digital signal processing in
hearing aids offers new, effective means for the
rehabilitation of hearing impairment. Apart from higher
acoustic signal quality, digital hearing-aids allow for the
implementation of specific speech processing strategies.
For many of these strategies, an estimate of the speech-to-
noise ratio (SNR) of the acoustical environment is
desirable. Specifically, applications are considered in
which complex algorithms for speech processing are
optimized for specific acoustic environments, but such
algorithms might fail in situations that do not meet the
specific assumptions. This holds true especially for noise
reduction schemes that might introduce processing artifacts
in quiet environments or in situations where the SNR is
below a certain threshold. An optimum choice for;parameters
of compression algorithms and amplification might depend on
the speech-to-noise ratio, so that an adaption of the
parameter set depending on SNR estimates help in proving
the benefit. Furthermore, SNR estimates could directly be
used as control parameters for noise reduction schemes,
such as Wiener filtering or spectral subtraction.:

Other applications are in the field of speech enhancement
of a movie sound. It has been found that many people have
problems understanding the speech content of a movie, e.g.,
due to hearing impairments. In order to follow the plot of
a movie, it is important to understand the relevant speech
of the audio track, e.g. monologues, dialogues,
announcements and narrations. People who are hard of
hearing often experience that background sounds, e.g.
environmental noise and music are presented at a too high
level with respect to the speech. In this case, it is
desired to increase the level of the speech signals and to
attenuate the background sounds or, generally, to increase
the level of the speech signal with respect to the total
level.
A prominent approach to speech enhancement is spectral
weighting, also referred to as short-term spectral
attenuation, as illustrated in Fig. 3. The output signal
y[k] is computed by attenuating the sub-band signals X(ω)
of the input signals x[k] depending on the noise energy
within the sub-band signals.
In the following the input signal x[K] is assumed to be an
additive mixture of the desired speech signal s[k] and
background noise b[k].
x[k] = s[k]+b[k] .(1)
Speech enhancement is the improvement in the objective
intelligibility and/or subjective quality of speech..
A frequency domain representation of the input signal is
computed by means of a Short-term Fourier Transform (STFT),
other time-frequency transforms or a filter bank as
indicated at 30. The input signal is then filtered in the
frequency domain according to Equation 2, whereas the
frequency response G(ω) of the filter is computed such that

the noise energy is reduced. The output signal is computed
by means of the inverse processing of the time-frequency
transforms or filter bank, respectively.

Appropriate spectral weights G(ω) are computed at 31 for
each spectral value using the input signal spectrum X(ω)
and an estimate of the noise spectrum B(ω) or,
equivalently, using an estimate of the linear sub-band SNR
R(ω)=S(ω))/B((ω). The weighted spectral value are transformed
back to the time domain in 32. Prominent examples of noise
suppression rules are spectral subtraction [S. Boll,
"Suppression of acoustic noise in speech using spectral
subtraction", IEEE Traris. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal
Processing, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 113-120, 1979] and Wiener
filtering. Assuming that the input signal is an additive
mixture of the speech and the noise signals and that speech
and noise are uncorrelated, the gain values for the
spectral subtraction- method are given in Equation 3.

Similar weights are derived from estimates of the linear
sub-band SNR R(CD) according to Equation 4.
Channel
Various extensions to spectral subtraction have been
proposed in the past, namely the use of an oversubtraction
factor and spectral floor parameter [M. Berouti> R.
Schwartz, J. Makhoul, "Enhancement of speech corrupted by
acoustic noise", Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics,
Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP, 1979], generalized
forms [J. Lim, A. Oppenheim, "Enhancement and bandwidth

t
compression of noisy speech", Proc. of the IEEE, vol 67,
no. 12, pp. 1586-1604, 1979], the use of perceptual
criteria (e.g. N. Virag, "Single channel speech
enhancement based on masking properties of the human
auditory system", IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Proc, vol.
7, no. 2, pp. 126-137, 1999) and multi-band spectral
subtraction (e.g. S. Kamath, P. Loizou, "A multi-band
spectral subtraction method for enhancing speech corrupted
by colored noise", Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. Acoust.
Speech Signal Processing, 2002). However, the crucial part
of a spectral weighting method is the estimation of the
instantaneous noise spectrum or of the sub-band SNR, which
is prone to errors especially if the noise is non-
stationary. Errors of the noise estimation lead to residual
noise, distortions of the speech components or musical
noise (an artefact which has been described as "warbling
with tonal quality" [P. Loizou, Speech Enhancement: Theory
and Practice, CRC Press, 2007]).
A simple approach to noise estimation is to measure and
averaging the noise spectrum during speech pauses. This
approach does not yield satisfying results if the noise
spectrum varies over time during speech activity and if the
detection of the speech pauses fails. Methods' for
estimating the noise spectrum even during speech activity
have been proposed in the past and can be classified
according to P. Loizou, Speech Enhancement: Theory and
Practice, CRC Press, 2007 as
• Minimum tracking algorithms
• Time-recursive averaging algorithms
• Histogram based algorithms '
- • i
The estimation of the noise spectrum using minimum
statistics has been propbsed in R. Martin, "Spectral
subtraction based on minimum statistics", Proc. of EUSlPCO,
Edingburgh, UK, 1994. The method is based on the tracking
of local minima of the signal energy in each sub-band. A

non-linear update rule for the noise estimate and faster
updating has been proposed in G. Dobl'inger,
"Computationally Efficient Speech Enhancement By Spectral
Minima Tracking In Subbands", Proc. of Eurospeech, Madrid,
Spain, 1995.
Time-recursive averaging algorithms estimate and update the
noise spectrum whenever the estimated SNR at a particular
frequency band is very low. This is done by computing
recursively the weighted average of the past noise estimate
and the present spectrum. The weights are determined as a
function of the probability that speech is present or as a
function of the estimated SNR in the particular frequency
band, e.g. in I. Cohen, "Noise estimation by minima
controlled recursive averaging for robust speech
enhancement", IEEE Signal Proc. Letters, vol. 9, no. 1, pp.
12-15, 2002, and in L. Lin, W. Holmes, E. Ambikairajah,
"Adaptive noise estimation algorithm for speech
enhancement", Electronic Letters, vol. 39, no. 9, pp. 754-
755, 2003.
Histogram-based methods rely on the assumption that the
histogram of the sub-band energy is often bimodal. A large
low-energy mode accumulates energy values of segments
without speech or with low-energy segments of speech. The
high-energy mode accumulates energy values of segments with
voiced speech and noise. The noise energy in a particular
sub-band is determined from the low-energy mode [H. Hirsch,
C. Ehrlicher, "Noise estimation techniques for robust
speech recognition", Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. oh
Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP, Detroit,
USA, 1995]. For a comprehensive recent review it is
referred to P. Loizou, Speech Enhancement: Theory and
Practice, CRC Press, 2007. ;l
Methods for the estimation of the sub-band SNR based on
supervised learning using amplitude modulation features are
reported in J. Tchorz, B. Kollmeier, "SNR Estimation based

on amplitude modulation analysis with applications to noise
suppression", IEEE Trans. On Speech and Audio Processing,
vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 184-192, 2003, and in M. Kleinschmidt,
V. Hohmann, "Sub-band SNR estimation using auditory feature
processing", Speech Communication: Special Issue on Speech
Processing for Hearing Aids, vol. 39, pp. 47-64, 2003.
Other approaches to speech enhancement are pitch-
synchronous filtering (e.g. in R. Frazier, S. Samsam, L.
Braida, A. Oppenheim, "Enhancement of speech by adaptive
filtering", Prqc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics,
Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP, Philadelphia, USA,
1976), filtering of Spectro Temporal Modulation (STM)
(e.g. in N. Mesgarani, S. Shamma, "Speech enhancement based
on filtering the spectro-temporal modulations", Prop, of
the IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal
Processing, ICASSP, Philadelphia, USA, 2005), and filtering
based on a sinusoidal model representation of the input
signal (e.g. J. Jensen, J. Hansen, „Speech enhancement
using a constrained iterative sinusoidal model", IEEE
Trans, on Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 9, no. 7, pp.
731-740, 2001).
The methods for the estimation of the sub-band SNR based;on
supervised learning using amplitude modulation features as
reported in J. Tchorz, B. Kollmeier, "SNR Estimation based
on amplitude modulation analysis with applications to .noise
suppression", IEEE Trans. On Speech and Audio Processing,
vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 184-^192, 2003, and in M. Kleinschmidt,
V. Hohmann, "Sub-band SNR estimation using auditory feature
processing", Speech Communication: Special Issue on Speech
Processing for Hearing Aids, vol. 39, pp. 47-64, 200312, 13
are disadvantageous in that two spectrogram processing
steps are required. The first spectrogram processing step
is to generate a time/frequency spectrogram of the time-
domain audio signal. Then, in order to generate1 the
modulation spectrogram, another "time/frequency" transform
is required, which transforms the spectral information from

the spectral domain into the modulation domain. Due to the
inherent systematic delay and the time/frequency resolution
issue inherent to any transform algorithm, this additional
transform operation incurs problems.
An additional consequence of this procedure is that noise
estimates are quite non-accurate in conditions where the
noise is non-stationary and where various noise signals may
occur.
Summary of the Invention
It is the object of the present invention to provide an
improved concept for speech enhancement.
In accordance with a first aspect, this object is achieved
by an apparatus for processing an audio signal to obtain
control information for a speech enhancement filter,
comprising: a feature extractor for obtaining a time
sequence of short-time spectral representations of the
audio signal and for extracting at least one feature in
each frequency band of a plurality of frequency bands for a
plurality of short-time spectral representations, the at
least one feature representing a spectral shape of a short-
time spectral representation in a frequency band of the
plurality of frequency bands; and a feature combiner for
combining the at least one feature for each frequency band
using combination parameters to obtain the control
information for the speech enhancement filter for a time
portion of the audio signal.
In accordance with a second aspect, this object is achieved
by a method of processing an audio signal to obtain control
information for a speech enhancement filter, comprising:
obtaining a time sequence of short-time spectral
representations of the audio signal; extracting at least
one feature in each frequency band of a plurality of

frequency bands for a plurality of short-time spectral
representations, the at least one feature representing a
spectral shape of a short-time spectral representation in a
frequency band of the plurality of frequency bands; and
combining the at least one feature for each frequency band
using combination parameters to obtain the control
information for the speech enhancement filter for a time
portion of the audio signal.
In accordance with a third aspect, this object is achieved
by an apparatus for speech enhancing in an audio signal,
comprising: an apparatus for processing the audio signal
for obtaining filter control information for a plurality of
bands representing a time portion of the audio signal; and
a controllable filter, the filter being controllable so
that a band of the audio signal is variably attenuated with
respect to a different band based on the control
information.
In accordance with a fourth aspect, this object is achieved
by a method of speech enhancing in an audio signal,
comprising: a method of processing the audio signal! for
obtaining filter control information for a plurality of
bands representing a time portion of the audio signal; and
controlling a filter so that a band of the audio signal is
variably attenuated with respect to a different band based
on the control information.
In accordance with a fifth aspect, this object is achieved
by an apparatus for training a feature combiner for
determining combination parameters of the feature combiner,
comprising: a feature ! extractor for obtaining a time
sequence of short-time spectral representations of a
training audio signal, for which a control information for
a speech enhancement filter per frequency band is known,
and for extracting at least one feature in each frequency
band of the plurality of frequency bands for a plurality of
short-time spectral representations, the at least one

feature representing a spectral shape of a short-time
spectral representation in a frequency band of the
plurality of frequency bands; and an optimization
controller for feeding the feature combiner with the at
least one feature for each frequency band, for calculating
the control information using intermediate combination
parameters, for varying the intermediate combination
parameters, for comparing the varied control information to
the known control information, and for updating the
intermediate combination parameters, when the varied
intermediate combination parameters result in control
information better matching with the known control
information.
In accordance with a sixth aspect, this object is achieved
by a method of training a feature combiner for determining
combination parameters of the feature combiner, comprising:
obtaining a time sequence of short-time spectral
representations of a training audio signal, for which* a
control information for a speech enhancement filter per
frequency band is known;1 extracting at least one feature in
each frequency band of the plurality of frequency bands for
a plurality of short-time spectral representations, the at
least one feature representing a spectral shape of a short-
time spectral representation in a frequency band of the
plurality of frequency bands; feeding the feature combiner
with the at least one ; feature for each frequency band;
calculating the control information using intermediate
combination parameters; varying the intermediate
combination parameters; comparing the varied control
information to the known control information; updating the
intermediate combination parameters, when the varied
intermediate combination parameters result in control
information better matching with the known control
information.

In accordance with a seventh aspect, this object is
achieved by a computer program for performing, when running
on a computer, any one of the inventive methods.
The present invention is based on the finding that a band-
wise information on the spectral shape of the audio signal
within the specific band is a very useful parameter for
determining control information for a speech enhancement
filter. Specifically, a band-wise-determined spectral shape
information feature for a plurality of bands and for a
plurality of subsequent short-time spectral representations
provides a useful feature description of an audio signal
for speech enhancement processing of the audio signal.
Specifically, a set of spectral shape features, where each
spectral shape feature is associated with a band of a
plurality of spectral bands, such as Bark bands or,
generally, bands having a variable bandwidth over the
frequency range already provides a useful feature set for
determining signal/noise ratios for each band. To this end,
the spectral shape features for a plurality of bands are
processed via a feature combiner for combining these
features using combination parameters to obtain the control
information for the speech1 enhancement filter for a time
portion of the audio signal for each band. Preferably, the
feature combiner includes a neural network, which is
controlled by many combination parameters, where these
combination parameters are determined in a training phase,
which is performed before actually performing the speech
enhancement filtering. Specifically, the neural network
performs a neural network regression method. A specific
advantage is that the combination parameters can be
determined within a training phase using audio material,
which can be different from the actual speech-enhanced
audio material, so that the training phase has to be
performed only a single time and, after this training
phase, the combination parameters are fixedly set and can
be applied to each unknown audio signal having a speech,
which is comparable to a speech characteristic of the

training signals. Such a speech characteristic can, for
example, be a language or a group of languages, such as
European languages versus Asian languages, etc.
Preferably, the inventive concept estimates the noise by
learning the characteristics of the speech using feature
extraction and neural networks, where the inventively
extracted features are straight-forward low-level spectral
features, which can be extracted in an efficient and easy
way, and, importantly, which can be extracted without a
large system-inherent delay, so that the inventive concept
is specifically useful for providing an accurate noise or
, SNR estimate, even in a situation where the noise is non-
stationary and where various noise signals occur.
Brief Description of the Drawings
Preferred embodiments of the present invention are
subsequently discussed in more detail by referring to the
attached drawings in which:
Fig. 1 is a block diagram of a preferred apparatus -or
method for processing an audio signal; ;
Fig. 2 is a block diagram of an apparatus or method for
training a feature combiner in accordance with a
preferred embodiment of the present invention;
Fig. 3 is a block diagram for illustrating a speech
enhancement apparatus and method in accordance
with a preferred embodiment of the present
invention;
Fig. 4 illustrates an overview over the procedure for
training a feature combiner and for applying a
neural network regression using the optimized
combination parameters;

Fig. 5 is a plot illustrating the gain factor »as a
function of the SNR, where the applied gains
(solid line) are compared to the spectral
subtraction gains (dotted line) and the Wiener
filter (dashed line);
Fig. 6 is an overview over the features per frequency
band and preferred additional features for the
full bandwidth;
Fig. 7 is a flow chart for illustrating a preferred
implementation of the feature extractor;
Fig. 8 illustrates a flow chart for illustrating a
preferred implementation of the calculation of
the gain factors per frequency value and the
subsequent calculation of the speech-enhanced
audio signal portion;
Fig. 9 illustrates an example Of the spectral weighting,
where the input time signal, the estimated sub-
band SNR, the estimated SNR in frequency bins
after interpolation, the spectral weights and the
processed time signal are illustrated; and
Fig. 10 is a schematic block diagram of a preferred
implementation of the feature combiner using a
multi-layer neural network.
Detailed Description of Preferred Embodiments
Fig. 1 illustrates a preferred apparatus for processing an
audio signal 10 to obtain control information 11 for a
speech enhancement filter 12. The speech enhancement filter
can be implemented in many ways, such as a controllable
filter for filtering the audio signal 10 using the control

information per frequency band for each of the plurality of
frequency bands to obtain a speech enhanced audio output
signal 13. As illustrated later, the controllable filter
can also be implemented as a time/frequency conversion,
' where individually calculated gain factors are applied to
the spectral values or spectral bands followed by a
subsequently performed frequency/time conversion.
The apparatus of Fig. 1 comprises a feature extractor 14
for obtaining a time sequence of short-time spectral
representations of the audio signal and for extracting at
least one feature in each frequency band of a plurality of
frequency bands for a plurality of short-time spectral
representations where the at least one feature represents a
spectral shape of a short-time spectral representation in a
frequency band of the plurality of frequency bands.
Additionally, the feature extractor 14 may be implemented
to extract other features apart from spectral-shape
features. At the output of the feature extractor 14 several
features per audio short-time spectrum exist where these
several features at least include a spectral shape feature
for each frequency band of a plurality of at least 10 or
preferably more, such as 20 to 30 frequency bands. These
features can be used as they are, or can be processed using
an average processing or any other processing, such as the
geometric average or arithmetic average or median
processing or other statistical moments processing (such as
variance, skewness, ...) in order to obtain, for each band, a
raw feature or an averaged feature, so that all these raw
and/or averaged features are input into a feature combiner
15. The feature combiner 15 combines the plurality of
spectral shape features and, preferably, additional
features using combination parameters, which dan be
provided via a combination parameter input 16, or which are
hard-wired or hard-programmed within the feature combiner
15 so that the combination parameter input 16 is not
required. At the output of the feature combiner, the
control information for the speech enhancement filtet for
*

each frequency band or "sub-band" of the plurality of
frequency bands or the plurality of sub-bands is obtained
for a time portion of the audio signal.
Preferably, the feature combiner 15 is implemented t as a
neural network regression circuit, but the feature combiner
can also be implemented as any other numerically or
statistically controlled feature combiner, which applies
any combination operation to the features output by the
feature extractor 14, so that, in the end, the required
control information, such as a band-wise SNR value or a
band-wise gain factor results. In the preferred embodiment
of a neural network' application, a training phase
("training phase" means a phase in which learning from
examples is performed) is required. In this training phase,
an apparatus for training a feature combiner 15 as
indicated in Fig. 2 is used. Specifically, Fig. 2
illustrates this apparatus for training a feature combiner
15 for determining combination parameters of the feature
combiner. To this end, the apparatus in Fig. 2 comprises
the feature extractor 14, which is preferably implemented
in the same way as the feature extractor 14 of Fig. 1.
Furthermore, the feature combiner 15 is also implemented in
the same way as the feature combiner 15 of Fig. 1. '
In addition to Fig. 1, the apparatus in Fig. 2 comprises an
optimization controller 20, which receives, as an input,
control information for a training audio signal as
indicated at 21. The training phase is performed based on
known training audio signals, which have a known
speech/noise ratio in each band. The speech portion and the
noise portion are - for example - provided separately from
each other and the actual SNR per band is measured on the
fly, i.e. during the learning operation. Specifically; the
optimization controller 20 is operative for controlling the
feature combiner, so that the feature combiner is fed with
the features from the feature extractor 14. Based on these
features and intermediate combination parameters coming

from a preceding iteration run, the feature combiner 15
then calculates control information 11. This control
information 11 is forwarded to the optimization controller
and is, in the optimization controller 20 compared to the
control information 21 for the training audio signal. The
intermediate combination parameters are varied in response
to an instruction from the optimization controller 20 and,
using this varied combination parameters, a further set of
control information is calculated by the feature combiner
15. When the further control information better matches the
control information for the training audio signal 21, the
optimization controller 20 updates the combination
parameters and sends these updated combination parameters
16 to the feature combiner to be used in the next run !as
intermediate combination parameters. Alternatively, or
additionally, the updated combination parameters can be
stored in a memory for further use.
Fig. 4 illustrates an overview of a spectral weighting
processing using feature extraction in the neural network
regression method. The parameters w of the neural network
are computed using the reference sub-band SNR values Rt and
features from the training items xt[k] during the training
phase, which is indicated on the left-hand side of Fig. 4.
The noise estimation and speech enhancement filtering is
shown on the right-hand side of Fig. 4.
The proposed concept follows the approach of spectral
weighting and uses a novel method for the computation of
the spectral weights. The noise estimation is based on a
supervised learning method and uses an inventive feature
set. The features aim at the discrimination of tonal versus
noisy signal components. Additionally, the proposed
features take the evolution of signal properties on a
larger time scale into account.
The noise estimation method presented here is able to deal
with a variety of non-stationary background sounds. A

robust SNR estimation in non-stationary background noise is
obtained by means of feature extraction ' and a neural
network regression method as illustrated in Fig. 4. The
real-valued weights are computed from estimates of the SNR
in frequency bands whose spacing approximates the Bark
scale. The spectral resolution of the SNR estimation is
rather coarse to enable the measurement of a spectral shape
in a band.
The left-hand side of Fig. 4 corresponds to a training
phase which, basically, has to be performed only once. The
procedure at the left-hand side of Fig. 4 indicated as
training 41 includes a reference SNR computation block 21,
which generates the control information 21 for a training
audio signal input into the optimization controller 20 of
Fig. 2. The feature extraction device 14 in Fig. 4 on the
training side corresponds to the feature extractor 14 of
Fig. 2. In particular, Fig. 2 has been illustrated to
receive a training audio signal, which consists of a speech
portion and a background portion. In order to be able to
perform a useful reference, the background portion bt and
the speech portion st are:separately available from each
other and are added via an adder 43 before being input into
the feature extraction device 14. Thus, the output of the
adder 43 corresponds to the training audio signal input
into the feature extractor 14 in Fig. 2.
The: neural network training device indicated at 15, 20
corresponds to blocks 15 and 20 and the corresponding
connection as indicated in Fig. 2 or as implemented via
other similar connections results in a set of combination
parameters w, which can be stored in the memory 40. These
combination parameters are then used in the neural network
regression device 15 corresponding to the feature combiner
15 of Fig. 1 when the inventive concept is applied as
indicated via application 42 in Fig. 4. The spectral
weighting device in Fig. 4 corresponds to the controllable
filter 12 of Fig. 1 and the feature extractor 14 in Fig. 4,

right-hand side corresponds to the feature extractor 14 in
Fig. 1.
In the following, a brief realization of the proposed
concept will be discussed in detail. The feature extraction
device 14 in Fig. 4 operates as follows.
A set of 21 different features has been investigated in
order to identify the best feature set for the estimation
of the sub-band SNR. These features were combined in
various configurations and were evaluated by means of
objective measurements and informal listening. The feature
selection process results in a feature set comprising the
spectral energy, the spectral flux, the spectral flatness,
the spectral skewness, the LPC and the RASTA-PLP
coefficients. The spectral energy, flux, flatness amd
skewness features are computed from the spectral
coefficient corresponding to the critical band scale.
The features are detailed with respect to Fig. 6.
Additional features are the delta feature of the spectral
energy and the delta-delta feature of the low-pass filtered
spectral energy and of the spectral flux.
The structure of the neural network used in blocks 15, 20
or 15 in Fig. 4 or preferably used in the feature combiner
15 in Fig. 1 or Fig. 2 is discussed in connection with Fig.
10. In particular, the preferred neural network includes a
layer of input neurons 100. Generally, n input neurons can
be used, i.e. one neuron per each input feature.
Preferably, the neuron network has 220 input neurons
corresponding to the number of features. The neural network
furthermore comprises a hidden layer 102 with p hidden
layer neurons. Generally, p is smaller than n and in the
preferred embodiment, the hidden layer has 50 neurons. On
the output side, the neural network includes an output
iayer 104 with q output neurons. In particular, the number
of output neurons is equal to the number of frequency bands

so that each output neuron provides a control information
for each frequency band such as an SNR (Speech-to-Noise
Ratio) information for each frequency band. If, for
example, 25 different frequency bands exist preferably
having a bandwidth, which increases from low to high
frequencies, then the output neurons' number q will be
equal to 25. Thus, the neural network is applied for the
estimation of the sub-band SNR from the computed low-level
features. The neural network has, as stated above, 220
input neurons and one hidden layer 102 with 50 neurons. The
number of output neurons equals the number of frequency
bands. Preferably, the hidden neurons include an activation
function, which is the hyperbolic tangent and the
activation function of the output neurons is the identity.
Generally, each neuron from layer 102 or 104 receives all
corresponding inputs, which are, with respect to layer 102,
the outputs of all input neurons. Then, each neuron of
layer 102 or 104 performs a weighted addition where the
weighting parameters :correspond to the combination
parameters. The hidden layer can comprise bias values in
addition to the parameters. Then, the bias values also
belong to the combination parameters. In particular, each
input is weighted by its corresponding combination
parameter and the output of the weighting operation, which
is indicated by an exemplary box 106 in Fig. 10 is input
into an adder 108 within each neuron. The output of the
adder or an input into a neuron may comprise a non-linear
function 110, which can be placed at the output and/or
input of a neuron e.g. in the hidden layer as the case may
be.
The weights of the neural network are trained on mixtures
of clean speech signals and background noises whose
reference SNR are computed using the separated signals. The
training process is illustrated on the left hand side of
Fig. 4. Speech and noise are mixed with an SNR of 3 dB per
item and fed into the1 feature extraction. This SNR is

constant over time and a broadband SNR value. The data set
comprises 2304 combinations of 48 speech signals and 48
noise signals of 2.5 seconds length each. The speech
signals originated of different speakers with 7 languages.
The noise signals are recordings of traffic noise, crowd
noise, and various natural atmospheres.
For a given spectral weighting rule, two definitions of the
output of the neural network are appropriate: The neural
network can be trained using the reference values for the
time-varying sub-band SNR R(Ω) or with the spectral weights
G(ω) (derived from the SNR values) . Simulations with sub-
band SNR as reference values yielded better objective
results and better ratings in informal listening compared
to nets which were trained with spectral weights. The
neural network is trained1 using 100 iteration cycles. A
training algorithm is used in this work, which is based on
scaled conjugate gradients.
Preferred embodiments of the spectral weighting operation
12 will subsequently be discussed.
The estimated sub-band SNR estimates are linearly
interpolated to the frequency resolution of the input
spectra and transformed to linear ratios R . The linear
sub-band SNR are smoothed along time and along frequency
using IIR low-pass filtering to reduce artifacts, which may
result from estimation errors. The low-pass filtering along
frequency is further needed to reduce the effect of
circular convolution, which occurs if the impulse response
of the spectral weighting exceeds the length of the DFT
frames. It is performed twice, whereas the second filtering
is done in reversed order (starting with the last sample)
such that the resulting filter has zero phases.
Fig. 5 illustrates the gain factor as a function of the
SNR. The applied gain (solid line) are compared to the

spectral subjection gains (dotted line) and the Wiener
filter (dashed line).
The spectral weights are computed according to the modified
spectral subtraction rule in Equation 5 and limited to -18
dB.
The parameters a = 3.5 and /β = 1 are determined
experimentally. This particular attenuation above 0 dB SNR
is chosen in order to avoid distortions of the speech
signal at the expense of residual noise. The attenuation
curve as a function of the SNR is illustrated in Fig. 5.
Fig. 9 shows an example for the input and output signals,
the estimated sub-band SNR and the spectral weights.
Specifically, Fig. 9 has an example of the spectral
weighting: Input time signal, estimated sub-band SNR,
estimated SNR in frequency bins after interpolation,
spectral weights and processed time signal.
Fig. 6 illustrates an overview over the preferred features
to be extracted by the feature extractor 14. The feature
extractor prefers, for each low resolution, a frequency
band, i.e. for each of the 25 frequency bands for which an
SNR or gain value is required, a feature representing the
spectral shape of the short time spectral representation in
the frequency band. The spectral shape in the band
represents the distribution of energy within the band and
can be implemented via several different calculation rules.
A preferred spectral shape feature is the spectral flatness
measure (SFM), which is the geometric mean of the spectral
values divided by the arithmetic mean of the spectral

values. In the geometric mean/arithmetic mean definition, a
power can be applied to each spectral value in the band
before performing the n-th root operation or the averaging
operation.
Generally, a spectral flatness measure can also be
calculated when the power for processing each spectral
value in the calculation formula for the SFM in the
denominator is higher than the power used for the
nominator. Then, both, the denominator and the nominator
may include an arithmetic value calculation formula.
Exemplarily, the power in the nominator is 2 and the power
in the denominator is 1. Generally, the power - used in the
nominator only has to be larger than the power used in the
denominator to obtain a generalized spectral flatness
measure.
It is clear from this calculation that the SFM for a band
in which the energy is equally distributed over the whole
frequency band is smaller than 1 and, for many frequency
lines, approaches small values close to 0, while in the
case in which the energy is concentrated in a single
spectral value within a band, for example, the SFM value is
equal to 1. Thus, a high SFM value indicates a band an
which the energy is concentrated at a certain position
within the band, while a small SFM value indicates that the
energy is equally distributed within the band.
Other spectral shape features include the spectral
skewness, which measures the asymmetry of the distribution
around its centroid. There exist other features which are
related to the spectral shape of a short time frequency
representation within a certain frequency band.
While the spectral shape is calculated for a frequency
band, other features exist, which are calculated for a
frequency band as well as indicated in Fig. 6 and as
discussed in detail below. And, additional features also

exist, which do not necessarily have to be calculated for a
frequency band, but which are calculated for the full
bandwidth.
Spectral energy
The spectral energy is computed for each time frame and
frequency band and normalized by the total energy of the
frame. Additionally, the spectral energy is low-pass
filtered over time using a second-order IIR filter.
Spectral flux
The spectral flux SF is defined as the dissimilarity
between spectra of successive frames 20 and is frequently
implemented by means of a distance function. In this work,
the spectral flux is computed using the Euclidian distance
according to Equation 6, with spectral coefficients X(m,k),
time frame index m , sub-band index r , lower and 'upper
boundary of the frequency band lr and ur, respectively^ .

Spectral fl<
Various definitions for the computation of the flatness of
a vector or the tonality of a spectrum (which is inversely
related to the flatness of a spectrum) exist. The spectral
flatness measure SFM used here is computed as the ratio of
the geometric mean and the arithmetic mean of the L
spectral coefficients of the sub-band signal as shown in
Equation 7.
Spectral skewness

The skewness of a distribution measures its asymmetry
around its centroid and is defined as the third central
moment of a random variable divided by the cube of its
standard deviation.
Linear Prediction Coefficients
The LPC are the coefficients of an all-pole filter, "which
predicts the actual value x(k) of a time series from the
preceding values such that the squared error
is minimized.
The LPC are computed by means of the autocorrelation
method.
Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients
The power spectra are warped according to the mel-scale
using triangular weighting functions with unit weight for
each frequency band. The MFCC are computed by taking the
logarithm and computing the Discrete Cosine Transform.
Relative spectra^ perceptual linear prediction coefficients
The RASTA-PLP coefficients [H. Hermansky, N. Morgan, "RASTA
Processing of Speech", IEEE Trans. On Speech and Audio
Processing, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 578-589, 1994] are computed
from the power spectra in the following steps:
1. Magnitude compression of the ;.. spectral
coefficients
2. Band-pass filtering of the sub-band energy over
time

3. Magnitude expansion which relates to the inverse
processing of step 2
4. Multiplication with weights that correspond to an
equal loudness curve
5. Simulation of loudness sensation by raising the
coefficients to the power of 0.33
6. Computation of an all-pole model of resulting
spectrum by means of the autocorrelation method
perceptual linear prediction (PLP) coefficients
The PLP values are computed similar to the RASTA-PLP but
without applying steps 1-3 [H. Hermansky, "Perceptual
Linear Predictive Analysis for Speech", J. Ac. Soc. Am.,
vol. 87, no. 4, pp. 1738 - 1752, 1990].
Delta features
Delta features have been successfully applied in automatic
speech recognition and audio content classification in the
past. Various ways for their computation exist. Here, they
are computed by means of convolving the time sequence of a
feature with a linear slope with a length of 9 samples (the
sampling rate of the feature time series equals the frame
rate of the STFT). Delta-delta features are obtained by
applying the delta operation to the delta features.
As indicated above, it is preferred to have a band
separation of the low-resolution frequency band, which is
similar to the perceptual situation of the human hearing
system. Therefore, a logarithmic band separation or a Bark-
like band separation is preferred. This means that! the
bands having a low center frequency are narrower than the
bands having a high center frequency. In the calculation of

the spectral flatness measure, for example, the summing
operation extends from a value q, which is normally the
lowest frequency value in a band and extends to the count
value ur, which is the highest spectral value within a
predefined band. In Order to have a better spectral
flatness measure, it is preferred to use, in the lower
bands, at least some or all spectral values from the lower
and/or the upper adjacent frequency band. This means that,
for example, the spectral flatness measure for the second
band is calculated using the spectral values of the second
band and, additionally, using the spectral values of the
first band and/or the third band. In the preferred
embodiment, not only the spectral values of either the
first or the second bands are used, but also the spectral
values of the first band and the third band are used. This
means that when calculating the SFM for the second band, q
in the Equation (7) extends from lr equal to the first
(lowest) spectral value of the first band and ur is equal
to the highest spectral value in the third band. Thus, a
spectral shape feature, which is based on a higher number
of spectral values, can be calculated until a certain
bandwidth at which the number of spectral values within the
band itself is sufficient so that lr and ur indicate
spectral values from the same low-resolution frequency
band.
Regarding the linear prediction coefficients, which are
extracted by the feature iextractor, it is preferred to
either use the LPC aj of Equation (8) or the residual /error
values remaining after the optimization or any combination
of the coefficients and the error values such as a
multiplication or an addition with a normalization factor
so that the coefficients as well as the squared error
values influence the LPC feature extracted by the feature
extractor.
An advantage of the spectral shape feature is that it is a
low-dimensional feature. When, for example, the

bandwidth having 10 complex or real spectral values is
considered, the usage of all these 10 complex or' real
spectral values would not be useful and would be a waste of
computational resources. Therefore, the spectral shape
feature is extracted, which has a dimension, which is lower
than the dimension of the raw data. When, for example, the
energy is considered, then the raw data has a dimension of
10, since 10 squared spectral values exist. In order to
extract the spectral-shape feature, which can be
efficiently used, a spectral-shape feature is extracted,
which has a dimension smaller than the dimension of the raw
data and which, preferably, is at 1 or 2. A similar
dimension-reduction with respect to the raw data can be
obtained when, for example, a low-level polynomial fit to a
spectral envelope of a frequency band is done. When, for
example, only two or three parameters are fitted, then the
spectral-shape feature includes these two or three
parameters of a polynomial or any other parameterization
system. Generally, all parameters, which indicate the
distribution of energy within a frequency band and which
have a low dimension of less than 5% or at least less than
50% or only less than 30% of the dimension of raw data are
useful.
It has been found out that the usage of the spectral shape
feature alone already results in an advantageous behavior
of the apparatus for processing an audio signal, but it is
preferred to use at least an additional band-wise feature.
It has also been shown that the additional band-wise
feature useful in providing improved results is the
spectral energy per band, which is computed for each time
frame and frequency band and normalized by the total energy
of the frame. This feature can be low-passed filtered or
not. Additionally, it has been found out that the addition
of the spectral flux feature advantageously enhances the
performance of the inventive apparatus so that an efficient
procedure resulting in a good performance is obtained when
the spectral shape feature per band is used in addition to

the spectral energy feature per band and the spectral flux
feature per band. In addition to the additional features,
this again enhances the performance of the inventive
apparatus.
As discussed with respect to the spectral energy feature, a
low-pass filtering of this feature over time or applying a
moving average normalization over time can be applied, but
does not have to necessarily be applied. In the former
case, an average of, for example, the five preceding
spectral shape features for the corresponding band are
calculated and the result of this calculation is used as
the spectral shape feature for the current band in the
current frame. This averaging, however, can also be applied
bi-directionally, so that for the averaging operation, not
only features from the past, but also features from the
"future" are used to calculate the current feature.
Figs. 7 and 8 will subsequently be discussed in order to
provide the preferred implementation of the feature
extractor 14 as illustrated in Fig. 1, Fig. 2 or Fig. 4. In
a first step, an audio signal is windowed in order to
provide a block of audio sampling values as indicated in
step 70. Preferably, an overlap is applied. This means that
one and the same audio sample occurs in two successive
frames due to the overlap range, where an overlap of 50%
with respect to the audio sampling values is preferred. In
step 71, a time/frequency conversion of a block of windowed
audio sampling values is performed in order to obtain a
frequency representation with a first resolution, which is
a high resolution. To this end, a short-time Fourier
transform (STFT) implemented with an efficient FFT is
obtained. When step 71 is applied several times with
temporally succeeding blocks of audio sampling values, a
spectrogram is obtained as known in the art. In step 72,
the high-resolution spectral information, i.e> the high-
resolution spectral values are grouped into low-resolution
frequency bands. When, for example, an FFT wit' "

2048 input values is applied, 1024 or 2048 spectral values
exist, but such a high resolution is neither required nor
intended. Instead, the grouping step 72 results in a
division of the high resolution spectrum into a small
number of bands, such as bands having a varying bandwidth
as, for example, known from Bark bands or from a
logarithmic band division. Then, subsequent to the step of
grouping 72, a calculation 73 of the spectral shape feature
and, preferably, other features is performed for each of
the low-resolution bands. Although not indicated in Fig. 7,
additional features relating to the whole frequency band
can be calculated using the data obtained at step 70, since
for these full-band width features, any spectral
separations obtained by step 71 or step 72 are not
required.
Step 73 results in spectral shape features, which have m
dimensions, where m is smaller than n and, preferably, is 1
or 2 per frequency band. This means that the information
for a frequency band present after step 72 is compressed
into a low dimension information present afterl step 73 by
the feature extractor operation.
As indicated in Fig. 7 near step 71 and step 72, the step
of time/frequency conversion and grouping can be replaced
for different operations. The output of step 70 can be
filtered with a low-resolution filter bank which, for
example, is implemented so that at the output, 25 sub-band
signals are obtained. The high-resolution analysis of. each
sub-band can then be performed to obtain the raw data for
the spectral shape feature calculation. This can be done,
for example, by an FFT analysis of a sub-band signal or by
any other analysis of a sub-band signal, such as by further
cascaded filter banks.
Fig. 8 illustrates the preferred procedure for implementing
the controllable filter 12 of Fig. 1 or the spectral
weighting feature illustrated in Fig. 3 or indicated at 12

in Fig. 4. Subsequent to the step of determining the low
resolution band-wise control information, such as the sub-
band SNR values, which are output by the neural network
regression block 15 of Fig. 4, as indicated at step 80, a
linear interpolation to the high resolution in step 81 is
performed.
It is the purpose to finally obtain a weighting factor for
each spectral value obtained by the short-time Fourier
transform performed in step 30 of Fig. 3 or performed in
step 71 or the alternative procedure indicated to the right
of steps 71 and 72. Subsequent to step 81, an SNR value for
each spectral value is obtained. However, this SNR value is
still in the logarithmic domain and step 82 provides a
transformation of the logarithmic domain into a linear
domain for each high-resolution spectral value.
In step 83, the linear SNR values for each spectral value,
i.e. at the high resolution are smoothed over time and
frequency, such as using IIR low-pass filters or,
alternatively, FIR low-pass filters, e.g. any moving
average operations can be applied. In step 84, the spectral
weights for each high-resolution frequency values are
calculated based on the smoothed linear SNR values. This
calculation relies on the function indicated in Fig. 5,
although the function indicated in this Fig. is given in
logarithmic terms, while the spectral weights for each
high-resolution frequency value in step 84 are calculated
in the linear domain.
In step 85, each spectral value is then multiplied by the
determined spectral weight to obtain a set of high-
resolution spectral values, which have been multiplied by
the set of spectral weights. This processed spectrum is
frequency-time converted in step 86. Depending on the
application scenario and depending on the overlap used In
step 80, a cross-fading operation can be performed between
two blocks of time domain audio sampling values obtained by
i

two subsequent frequency-time converting steps to address
blocking artifacts.
Additional windowing can be applied to reduce circular
convolution artifacts.
The result of step 86 is a block of audio sampling values,
which has an improved speech performance, i.e. the speech
can be perceived better than compared to the corresponding
audio input signal where the speech enhancement has not
been performed.
Depending on certain implementation requirements of the
inventive methods, the inventive methods can be implemented
in hardware or in software. The implementation can be
performed using a digital storage medium, in particular, a
disc, a DVD or a CD having electronically-readable control
signals stored thereon, which co-operate with programmable
computer systems such that the inventive methods are
performed. Generally, the present invention is therefore a
computer program product with a program code stored on a
machine-readable carrier, the program code being operated
for performing the inventive methods when the computer
program product runs on a computer. In other words, the
inventive methods are, therefore, a computer program having
a program code for performing at least one of the inventive
methods when the computer program runs on a computer.
The described embodiments are merely illustrative for the
principles of the present invention. It is understood that
modifications and variations of the arrangements and the
details described herein will be apparent to others
skilled in the art. It is the intent, therefore, to be
limited only by the scope of the impending patent claims
and not by the specific details presented by way of
description and explanation of the embodiments herein.

1. Apparatus for processing an audio signal to obtain
control information for a speech enhancement filter,
comprising:
a feature extractor for obtaining a time sequence of
short-time spectral representations of the audio
signal and for extracting at least one feature in each
frequency band of a plurality of frequency bands for a
plurality of short-time spectral representations, the
at least one feature representing a spectral shape of
a short-time spectral representation in a frequency
band of the plurality of frequency bands; and
a feature combiner for combining the at least one
feature for each frequency band using combination
parameters to obtain the control information for the
speech enhancement ' filter for a time portion of the
audio signal.
2. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to extract at least one
additional feature representing a characteristic.of a
short-time spectral: representation different from the
spectral shape, and
in which the feature combiner is operative to combine
the at least one additional feature and the at least
one feature for each frequency band using the
combination parameters 1
3. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to apply a frequency
conversion operation, in which, for a sequence of time
instants,a sequence of spectral representations is
obtained, the spectral representations having

frequency bands with non-uniform bandwidths, a
bandwidth becoming larger with an increasing center
frequency of a frequency band.
4. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to calculate, as the
first feature, a spectral flatness measure per band
representing a distribution of energy within the band,
or as a second feature, a measure of a normalized
energy per band, the normalization being based on the
total energy of a signal frame, from which the
spectral representation is derived, and
wherein the feature combiner is operative to use the
spectral flatness measure for a band or the normalized
energy per band.
5. Apparatus in accordance with one of the preceding
claims, in which the feature extractor is operative to
additionally extract, for each band, a spectral flux
measure representing a -similarity or a dissimilarity
between time-successive spectral representations or a
spectral skewness measure, the spectral skewness
measure representing an asymmetry around a centroid.
6. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to additionally extract
LPC features, the LPC features including an LPC error
signal, linear prediction coefficients until a
predefined order or a combination of the LPC error
signals and linear prediction coefficients, or in
which the feature extractor is operative to
additionally extract PLP cbefficients or RASTA-PLP
coefficients or mel-frequency cepstral coefficients or
delta features.
7. Apparatus in accordance with claim 6, in which the
feature extractor is operative to calculate the linear

prediction coefficient features for a block of time-
domain audio samples, the block including audio
samples used for extracting the at least one feature
representing the spectral shape for each frequency
band.
8. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to calculate the shape
of the spectrum in a frequency band using spectral
information of one or two immediately adjacent
frequency bands and the spectral information of the
frequency band only.
9. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to extract raw feature
information for each feature per block of audio
samples and to combine the sequence of raw feature
information in a frequency band to obtain the at least
one feature for the frequency band.
10. Apparatus in accordance with claim 1, in which the
feature extractor is operative to calculate, for each
frequency band, a number of spectral values and to
combine the number of spectral values to obtain the at
least one feature representing the spectral shape so
that the at least one feature has a dimension, which
is smaller than the number of spectral values in the
frequency band.
11. Method of processing an audio signal to obtain control
information for a speech enhancement filter,
comprising:
obtaining a time sequence of short-time spectral
representations of the audio signal;
extracting at least one feature in each frequency band
of a plurality of frequency bands for a plurality of

short-time spectral representations, the at least one
feature representing a spectral shape of a short-time
spectral representation in a frequency band of the
plurality of frequency bands; and
combining the at least one feature for each frequency
band using combination parameters to obtain the
control information for the speech enhancement filter
for a time portion of the audio signal.
12. Apparatus for speech enhancing in an audio signal,
comprising:
an apparatus for processing the audio signal in
accordance with claim 1 for obtaining filter control
information for a plurality of bands representing a
time portion of the audio signal; and
a controllable filter, the filter being controllable
so that a band of the audio signal is variably
attenuated with respect to a different band based on
the control information.
13. Apparatus in accordance with claim 13, in which the
apparatus for processing includes the time frequency
converter providing spectral information having a
higher resolution than a spectral resolution, for
which the control information is provided; and
in which the. apparatus additionally comprises a
control information post-processor for interpolating
the control information to the high resolution ahd to
smooth the interpolated control information to obtain
a post-processed control information based on which
controllable filter parameters of the controllable
filter are set.

14. Method of speech enhancing in an audio signal,
comprising:
a method of processing the audio signal in accordance
with claim 11 for obtaining filter control information
for a plurality of bands representing a time portion
of the audio signal; and
controlling a filter so that a band of the audio
signal is variably attenuated with respect *to a
different band based on the control information.
15. Apparatus for training a feature combiner for
determining combination parameters of the feature
combiner, comprising:
a feature extractor for obtaining a time sequence of
short-time spectral representations of a training
audio signal, for which a control information for a
speech enhancement filter per frequency band is known,
and for extracting at least one feature in each
frequency band of the plurality of frequency bands for
a plurality of short-time spectral representations,
the at least one feature representing a spectral shape
of a short-time spectral representation in a frequency
band of the plurality of frequency bands; and
an optimization controller for feeding the feature
combiner with the at least one feature for each
frequency band, for calculating the control
information using intermediate combination parameters,
for varying the intermediate combination parameters,
for comparing the varied control information to the
known control information, and for updating- the
intermediate combination parameters, when the varied
intermediate combination parameters result in control
information better matching with the known control
information.

16. Method of training a feature combiner for determining
combination parameters of the feature combiner,
comprising:
obtaining a time sequence of short-time spectral
representations of a training audio signal, for which
a control information for a speech enhancement filter
per frequency band is known;
extracting at least one feature in each frequency band
of the plurality of frequency bands for a plurality of
short-time spectral representations, the at least one
feature representing a spectral shape of a short-time
spectral representation in a frequency band of the
plurality of frequency bands;
feeding the feature combiner with the at least one
feature for each frequency band;f
calculating the control information using intermediate
combination parameters;
varying the intermediate combination parameters;'
comparing the varied control information to the known
control information;
updating the intermediate combination parameters, when
the varied intermediate combination parameters result
in control information better matching with the known
control information.
17. Computer program for performing, when running on a
computer, a method in accordance with claim 11, 14 or
16. ■■■;■ •

An apparatus for processing an audio signal to obtain control information for a speech enhancement filter(12) comprises a feature extractor(14) for extracting at least one feature per frequency band of a plurality of frequency bands of a short-time spectral representation of a plurality of short-time spectral representations, where the at least one feature represents a spectral shape of the short-time spectral representation in the frequency band. The apparatus additionally comprises a feature combirier(15) for combining the at least one feature for each frequency band using combination parameters to obtain the control information for the speech enhancement filter for a time portion of the audio signal. The feature combiner can use a neural network regression method, which is based on combination parameters determined in a training phase for the neural network.