Single-channel speech enhancement using inter-component phase relations

Phase-aware processing has recently attracted lots of interest among researchers in speech signal processing field as successful results have been reported for various applications including automatic speech/speaker recognition, noise reduction, anti-spoofing and speech synthesis. In all these applications, the success of the applied phase-aware processing method is predominantly affected by the robustness and the accuracy of the provided estimate of the clean spectral phase to be obtained from noisy observation. Therefore, in this paper, we first consider the inter-component phase relations of poly-harmonic signals as speech captured by Phase Invariance, Phase Quasi-Invariance and Bi-Phase constraints. Then, relying on these constraints between harmonics as phase structure, we propose phase estimators. Throughout various experiments we demonstrate the usefulness of the newly proposed methods. We further report the achievable speech enhancement performance by the proposed phase estimators and compare them with the benchmark methods in terms of perceived quality, speech intelligibility and phase estimation accuracy. The proposed methods show improved performance averaged over different noise scenarios and signal-to-noise ratios.