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Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101
www.elsevier.com/locate/specom

Speech enhancement based on b-order MMSE estimation of Short

Time Spectral Amplitude and Laplacian speech modeling
Hamid Reza Abutalebi ⇑, Mehdi Rashidinejad
Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

Received 4 January 2014; received in revised form 20 November 2014; accepted 2 December 2014
Available online 9 December 2014

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of speech enhancement employing the Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) of b-order Short
Time Spectral Amplitude (STSA). The motivation has been to take advantages of both Laplacian speech modeling and b-order cost func-
tion in MMSE estimation of clean speech. We present an analytical solution for b-order MMSE STSA estimator assuming Laplacian
prior for the real and imaginary parts of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) coefficients of (clean) speech. We also assume Gaussian
distribution for the real and imaginary parts of the DFT coefficients of the noise. The analytical solution, named b-order LapMMSE,
does not have a closed form and is highly non-linear and computationally complex. Using some approximations for the joint probability
density function and the Bessel function, we also present an improved closed-form version of the estimator (called b-order ImpLa-
pMMSE). The value of b is adapted as a function of frame Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). We have compared the performance of the
proposed estimator with the state-of-the-art estimators that assume either Gaussian or Laplacian probability density functions for
the real and imaginary parts of the DFT coefficients of clean speech. To this end, the input noisy signal and the outputs of MMSE STSA,
b-order STSA, and ImpLapMMSE estimators have been compared with the output of the proposed estimator. Our comparative eval-
uations in terms of Segmental SNR (SegSNR), Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ), and Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) dis-
tance demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed b-order ImpLapMMSE estimator.
Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Speech enhancement; Laplacian speech modeling; Spectral amplitude estimation; b-order MMSE

1. Introduction Amplitude (STSA) estimator of clean speech signal by

In increasing number of speech processing applications,
noise reduction is becoming an essential pre-processing
component to improve system performance. In the past
three decades, Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE)-
based single-channel speech enhancement algorithms have
received a lot of attention. The fundamental work in this
topic backs to the presentation of Short Time Spectral
⇑ Corresponding author at: Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.,
Yazd University, Pajuhesh St., Safaieh, 89195-741 Yazd, Iran. Tel.: +98
(35)31232396; fax: +98 (35)38200144.
E-mail address: habutalebi@yazd.ac.ir (H.R. Abutalebi).
Ephraim and Malah (1984). In this method, the MMSE
estimation of clean speech STSA is obtained and combined
with the short time phase of noisy signal to produce the
enhanced speech signal. Ephraim and Malah then extended
the STSA estimator to a Log Spectral Amplitude (LSA)
estimator by utilizing a perceptually-motivated cost func-
tion which minimizes the mean squared error between the
LSAs of the clean and estimated signals (Ephraim and
Malah, 1985). Considering speech presence uncertainty, a
modified version of LSA, called Optimally Modified-LSA
(OM-LSA) estimator, was proposed by Cohen (2001).
On the other side, as a good trade-off between speech
distortion and noise reduction, You et al. (2005) proposed

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2014.12.002
0167-6393/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101
the b-order MMSE approach for the STSA estimation of
clean speech. In their work, You et al. investigated the
effectiveness of range of b values in estimating STSA based
on the MMSE criterion, and discussed how the b value
could be adapted using the frame signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR). By incorporating the speech presence probability
in b-order MMSE approach, an improved version of the
b-order MMSE estimator was also presented and applied
in speech enhancement (Dashtbozorg and Abutalebi,
2009; You et al., 2009) and dereverberation tasks
(Abutalebi and Dashtbozorg, 2011). In these works, some
alternative approaches were also proposed for the adapta-
tion of b value; while (You et al., 2009) considered b value
as a function of both local and frame SNRs, in (Abutalebi
and Dashtbozorg, 2011) the value of b was calculated
through a linear relationship with speech presence proba-
bility for each frame and each frequency bin. Furthermore,
inspiring by the masking property of human auditory
system, another generalization of STSA estimator was pro-
posed in (Loizou, 2005), where the MMSE cost function
was weighted by the p-th power of STSA of the clean
speech. Finally, incorporating both aspects of spectral
weighting and b-order MMSE estimation, a generalized
weighted b-order STSA estimator was proposed and exam-
ined in (Plourde and Champagne, 2008; Deng et al., 2014).
However, most of the previous works (including those in
(Ephraim and Malah, 1984, 1985; Cohen, 2001; You et al.,
2005; Abutalebi and Dashtbozorg, 2011)) are based on
assuming Gaussian prior for the real and imaginary parts
of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) coefficients of clean
speech signal. This Gaussian assumption, however, holds
asymptotically for long duration analysis frames, for which
the span of the correlation of the signal is much shorter than
the DFT size. While this assumption might hold for the real
and imaginary parts of noise DFT coefficients, it does not
hold for the real and imaginary parts of speech DFT coef-
ficients, which are typically estimated using relatively short
(20–30 ms) duration windows (Chen and Loizou, 2007). To
resolve this shortcoming and improve the speech estimator,
more recently, researchers have searched for adopting a
more appropriate statistical model for the real and imagi-
nary parts of DFT coefficients of speech signal. In this
way, non-Gaussian distributions have been employed to
model the real and imaginary parts of DFT coefficients of
(clean) speech signals. Generally, a Laplacian or a Gamma
probability density function (pdf) is used to model real and
imaginary parts of the clean DFT coefficients. For example,
see (Breithaupt and Martin, 2003; Chen and Loizou 2005,
2007; Erkelens et al., 2007; Gazor and Zhang, 2005;
Hendriks and Heusdens, 2010; Lotter and Vary, 2003;
Martin 2002, 2005).
The suitability of Laplacian or Gamma pdf has been
validated through comparing different non-Gaussian distri-
butions with the histograms of real and imaginary parts of
the clean speech DFT coefficients from a large speech data-
base (Martin, 2002). This can be also justified by consider-
ing that the short size of the DFT frames results in a
93
distribution tail which is not properly modeled by Gauss-
ian prior; instead, Laplacian or Gamma distribution can
model this heavy tail more appropriately.
The use of Laplacian or Gamma pdf, however, compli-
cates the derivation of the MMSE estimate of the magni-
tude spectrum. This complication is partly because the
magnitude and phase of the DFT coefficients are no longer
independent when the real and imaginary parts of the DFT
coefficients are modeled by a Laplacian (or Gamma) distri-
bution (Chen and Loizou, 2007).
Chen and Loizou (2007) derived an approximate
MMSE estimator (named LapMMSE) of the speech mag-
nitude spectrum based on Laplacian model for the real and
imaginary parts of speech DFT coefficients and Gaussian
model for the noise DFT coefficients. This estimator was
derived under the assumption that the magnitude and
phase of the complex DFT coefficients were independent.
The authors followed that work in (Rashidinejad et al.,
2010), where an improved version of LapMMSE (called
ImpLapMMSE) was presented using appropriate approxi-
mations for the pdf of speech magnitude spectrum and the
Bessel function.
The motivation of current work is to take advantages of
both Laplacian speech modeling and b-order MMSE
approach for speech enhancement. In the present paper,
starting with a formulation similar to that of (Chen and
Loizou, 2007), we derive b-order LapMMSE estimator
when the clean speech DFT coefficients are modeled by a
Laplacian distribution. However, the derived analytical
solution is highly non-linear, computationally complex,
and very time-consuming for implementation. Hence, sim-
ilar to our approach in (Rashidinejad et al., 2010), we
apply some approximations for the Bessel function as well
as for the pdf of the magnitude spectrum of the clean
speech, to reduce the complexity of the estimator. This is
shown to result in an improved closed form of the estima-
tor, namely b-order ImpLapMMSE. In the proposed
method, the order of the cost function (b) is adapted based
on the frame SNR.
Simulation results on a wide range of noisy conditions
demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the cor-
rupting noise component in a better way, which results in
less residual noise compared to many existing methods
(with either Laplacian or Gaussian assumption).
In the aspect of utilized b-order cost function, our pro-
posed method is similar to the work of Breithaupt et al.
(2008) which presents an analytic solution for parameter-
ized (or, b-order) MMSE estimation of the speech STSA
based on a Chi-distribution for the prior model of (clean)
speech spectral magnitude.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section
2, we explain our formulation and derivation of the pro-
posed b-order LapMMSE estimator. In Section 3, a closed
form expression is derived as b-order ImpLapMMSE esti-
mator. In Section 4, we explain our evaluation process and
discuss the resulting performance. Finally, Section 5 con-
cludes the paper.
94 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101

2R
R  3b1
2. b-Order LapMMSE estimator 1 bþ1

xk exp
x2k 2p
exp 2xk Y k cos hk
 p xk
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðjcos h j þ jsin h j Þ dh dx
k k k k
6 0 kd ðkÞ 0 kd ðkÞ kx ðkÞ 7
bk ¼6
X
R  7:
4 R1 x2k
5
Let r(n) = s(n) + d(n), where s(n), d(n), and r(n) respec- 0
2p
xk exp  kd ðkÞ 0 exp 2xk Y k coshk
kd ðkÞ
x
 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðjcos hk j þ jsin hk jÞ dhk dxk
k
kx ðkÞ
tively denote clean speech signal, additive noise, and ð7Þ
received noisy signal. Applying the Short Time Fourier
Y 2k
Transform (STFT), we have Let nk , kkdx ðkÞ
ðkÞ
and ck , kd ðkÞ respectively denote the a priori
Rk ðlÞ ¼ S k ðlÞ þ Dk ðlÞ; ð1Þ and a posteriori SNRs (McAulay and Malpass, 1980). We
can express (7) in terms of the a priori and a posteriori
where l and k denote discrete time (frame) and frequency SNRs as follows:
indices, respectively. To simplify the notation, we omit l 2R
  3b1
pffiffiffi
1 bþ1 ck x2k R 2p
in the following and express the above equation as Rk = - 6 0
x k exp  Yk 2 0
exp 2xk ck cos hk
Yk

xk ck
p
Y k nk
ffiffiffi
ffi ð j cosh k j þ j sin h k j Þ dh k dx k
7
Sk + Dk. Using the exponential notation, the k-th spectral bk ¼6
X
  7:
4 R1 ck x2k R 2p
pffiffiffi
xk ck
5
2xk ck coshk
x exp  exp  p ffiffiffiffi ð j cos h j þ j sin h j Þ dh dx
component of clean speech signal and noisy signal can be 0 k Y 2 0
k
Yk Yk nk
k k k k

respectively expressed as ð8Þ

jhk
Sk ¼ X k e ; ð2:aÞ The above equation gives the b-order Laplacian MMSE
estimator of the spectral magnitude. In this article, this esti-
Rk ¼ Y k ejwk : ð2:bÞ
mator is referred to as the b-order Laplacian MMSE esti-
The objective is to find X^ k , the estimate of spectral mator (or briefly, b-order LapMMSE).
amplitude (magnitude) of clean speech. You et al. (2005) To the knowledge of the authors, (8) has no closed form
considered the following equation as a cost function: solution. In Chen and Loizou (2007), by applying some
n 2 o approximations, a closed form solution was derived for
J ¼ E X bk  X^ bk : ð3Þ the standard (b = 1) LapMMSE estimator (called
ApLapMMSE) assuming that the magnitude and phase
where E{} is the expectation operator. The cost function of the complex DFT coefficients of the clean speech signals
minimizes the mean-square error between the b-order are statistically independent. The marginal pdf of the phase
(clean) speech spectral amplitude and the b-order estimated can be derived from (6) as follows:
spectral amplitude. By minimizing the cost function with Z 1 " #
respect to X^ k , the estimated value of the spectral amplitude xk xk
f ðhk Þ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ dxk
is achieved as (You et al., 2005) 0 2 kx ðxÞ kx ðxÞ
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
   xk
¼
X^ k ¼ E X bk Rk
b
2ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ
"R 1 R 2p #b1 " #1
xk 
x b
f ðR jx ; h Þf ðx ; h Þdh dx 
¼ R0 1 R0 2p k k k k k k k k
; ð4Þ  exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ 
kx ðxÞ 
0 0
f ðRk jxk ; hk Þf ðxk ; hk Þdhk dxk 0
Z 1
1
where xk denotes the sample value of Xk; also, f(xk, hk) þ
0 2ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ
denotes the joint pdf of the magnitude (amplitude) and " #
phase spectra, and f(Rk|xk, hk) is given by Ephraim and xk
 exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ dxk
Malah (1984) kx ðxÞ
 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1 1 jhk 2 kx ðxÞ
f ðRk jxk ; hk Þ ¼ exp  jRk  xk e j ; ð5Þ ¼0
pkd ðkÞ kd ðkÞ 2ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ
2

" #1
where kd ðkÞ is the variance of the k-th DFT coefficient of xk 

the noise. Assuming Laplacian pdf for the real and imagi-  exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ 
kx ðxÞ 
nary parts of the speech DFT coefficients, f(xk, hk) is given pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
0

by Chen and Loizou (2007) kx ðxÞ

( ) ¼ : ð9Þ
2 þ 4j cos hk sin hk j
xk xk
f ðxk ; hk Þ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ðj cos hk j þ j sin hk jÞ ;
2 kx ðkÞ kx ðkÞ As for the marginal pdf of the magnitude, it has been
shown in (Chen and Loizou, 2007) that
ð6Þ
  Z p=4 sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi !
where kx ðkÞ is the variance of the k-th clean DFT coeffi- 2xk 2
f ðxk Þ ¼ exp  xk cos u du; xk P 0:
cient. Substituting (5) and (6) into (4), yields the following kx ðkÞ 0 kx ðkÞ
form of estimator: ð10Þ
 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101 95

X1   m
By considering 1 1
Ck ¼  F ðm; m; 1; 2nk ck Þ ; ð14:cÞ
X
1
m¼0
m! 2nk
expðx cos uÞ ¼ I 0 ðxÞ þ 2 I n ðxÞ cosðnuÞ; ð11Þ
" "
n¼1
8X 1
ð1Þn
np 1 n2 X
1
Cðm þ 12 n þ 1Þ
 m
1
where In(.) is the modified Bessel function of n-th order, the Dk ¼ sin
p n¼1 n 4 2nk m¼0 m!Cðm þ n þ 1Þ 2nk
marginal pdf of the magnitude can be re-written as (Chen ##
and Loizou, 2007)
!  F ðm;n  m;1;2nk ck Þ ; ð14:dÞ
pffiffiffi
pxk 2
f ðxk Þ ¼ I 0  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk
2kx ðkÞ kx ðkÞ and C() is the Gamma function. Also, F(a, b; c; d) is the
pffiffiffi !
Gaussian hypergeometric function defined as
4xk X 1
1 2 np
þ I n  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk sin ; x P 0: ð12Þ X1
kx ðkÞ n¼1 n kx ðkÞ 4 ðaÞn ðbÞn zn
F ða; b; c; zÞ, ; ð15Þ
n¼0
ðcÞn n!
Considering (6), (9) and (12), it is obvious that the
speech spectral amplitude and phase are not statistically where
independent, i.e., f(xk, hk) – f(xk)  f(hk). 8
Nonetheless, further analysis by Chen and Loizou (2007) < 1;
> n¼0
on the typical plots of f(xk, hk) and f(xk)  f(hk) has revealed ðqÞn , qðq þ 1Þðq þ 2Þ:::ðq þ n  1Þ; n > 0: ð16Þ
>
:
that the difference between these two densities is large
around xk  0, but the difference reduces to near zero for
xk P 2. So, for the magnitude values in the range of As shown in (14.a)–(14.d), the derived b-order
xk P 2, the joint pdf f(xk, hk) is almost equal to f(xk)  f(hk). ApLapMMSE estimator is highly non-linear and computa-
This in turn means that the magnitude and phase can be con- tionally complex. In Section 3, we present another expres-
sidered nearly independent, at least for a specific range of sion for f(xk, hk) and apply some approximations for Bessel
magnitude values (say xk P 2). Based on this observation, function which will result in a computationally-feasible
and assuming a uniform distribution for the marginal pdf estimator.
of the phase (i.e. f(hk)  1/2p for hk 2 [0, 2p)), it is possible
to approximate the joint pdf as (Chen and Loizou, 2007) 3. Derivation of the improved closed form approximation for
pffiffiffi ! b-order LapMMSE estimator
xk 2
f ðxk ; hk Þ  f ðxk Þ  f ðhk Þ  I 0  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk
4kx ðkÞ kx ðkÞ 3.1. Approximation of joint pdf
pffiffiffi !
2xk X 1 1
2 np
þ I n  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk sin ; As stated above, assuming the statistically independence
pkx ðkÞ n¼1 n kx ðkÞ 4
of the magnitude and phase, and considering (11) for
0 6 hk < 2p; x P 0: ð13Þ expanding the integrand of (10) in terms of Bessel func-
tions, the b-order ApLapMMSE (Eq. (14)) is obtained.
Using a formulation similar to (Chen and Loizou, 2007),
As mentioned before, (14) is highly complex and nonlinear;
we generalize the estimator for the case of b-order Lapla-
also, (14) involves an infinite number of terms. To solve
cian MMSE estimation. Substituting (5) and (13) into (4)
this problem, we exploit here an alternative expression
and using (Gradshteyn and Ryzhik, 2000, Thm.6.633.1),
for f(xk) (instead of (12)) to reach a more appropriate
the b-order ApLapMMSE estimator is achieved as
rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi approximation for joint pdf.
b k ¼ pffiffiffiffi b Ak þ Bk Y k ;
X
1
ð14Þ
Using the Taylor series expansion for the integrand of
ck C k þ D k (10) around xk = 0, we have
where Z p
2xk 4

1 
   m f ðxk Þ ¼ expðAxk cosðuÞÞdu
X C m þ 12 b þ 1 1 kx ðkÞ 0
Ak ¼  F ðm; m; 1; 2nk ck Þ ; Z pX
m¼0
m!Cðm þ 1Þ 2nk 2xk 4
1
ðAxk cosðuÞÞ
n
¼ du
ð14:aÞ kx ðkÞ 0 n¼0 n!
" n Z p4
8X
1
ð1Þ
n
pn 1 n2 X
1   
Cðmþ 12 nþ 12 bþ1Þ 1 m 2xk X 1
ðAxk Þ
Bk ¼ sin ¼ cosn ðuÞdu; ð17Þ
p n¼1 n 4 2nk m¼0 m!Cðmþnþ1Þ 2nk kx ðkÞ n¼0 n! 0
##
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
 F ðm;nm;1;2nk ck Þ ; ð14:bÞ where A ¼  2=kx ðkÞ. Considering the values of the fol-
lowing integrals:
96 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101

Rp Rp
4
cos0 ðuÞdu ¼ 4
du ¼ p4 Considering this expansion and using (Gradshteyn and
0 0
Rp pffiffi Rp Ryzhik, 2000, Thm.3.462.1) and (Abramowitz and
2
0
4
cosðuÞdu ¼ 2 4
0
cos2 ðuÞdu ¼ pþ2
8 Stegun, 1964), we get
R p4 pffiffi R p4
cos3 ðuÞdu ¼ 5122 cos4 ðuÞdu ¼ ð3pþ8Þ ð18Þ 2PM1 ck m 3b1
0 0 32 1
R p4 pffiffi R p4 Cðb þ 2m þ 2ÞD ðT Þ
b k ¼ p1ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 4 m¼0 ðm!Þ 2 2 ðbþ2mþ2Þ k
cos5 ðuÞdu ¼ 431202 cos6 ðuÞdu ¼ 15pþ44 X PM1 1 ck m 5 Y k;
0 0 192
2ck m¼0 ðm!Þ2 2 Cð2m þ 2ÞDð2mþ2Þ ðT k Þ
:::
ð24Þ
It can be easily deduced that pffiffi
where T k , 2p2ffiffiffi. Also, Dp(.) is parabolic cylinder function
Z p4 pffiffiffi!n p nk
n 2 2 p defined as
cos ðuÞdu   : ð19Þ ( pffiffiffi   pffiffiffiffiffiffi  )
0 p 4 p 2
z4 p p 1 z2 2pz 1  p 3 z2
Dp ðzÞ,2 e
2  M  ; ;   p M ; ; ;
C 1p
2
2 2 2 C 2 2 2 2
Substituting (19) in (17), we get
ð25Þ
n Z p4
2xk X 1
ðAxk Þ where M(a, b; z) is confluent hypergeometric function,
f ðxk Þ ¼ cosn ðuÞdu
kx ðkÞ n¼0 n! 0
X1
ðaÞn zn
pffiffiffi!n Mða; b; zÞ, ; ð26Þ
p 2xk X 1 n
ðAxk Þ 2 2 ðbÞn n!
 n¼0
4 kx ðkÞ n¼0 n! p

pffiffi n and (a)n and (b)n are calculated as defined in (16).
2 2
Axk The optimality of Taylor series expansion of Bessel func-
p 2xk X 1
p
 tions depends on the value of x; larger values of x (that cor-
4 kx ðkÞ n¼0 n! responds to higher SNRs) require more terms in series
pffiffiffi !
pxk 2 2 expansion (larger M). Increasing the number of summation
 exp Axk ; xk P 0: ð20Þ terms (M), (24) presents a good approximation of (22)
2kx ðkÞ p
(Rashidinejad et al., 2010), However, the resulting estima-
R þ1 tor is still computationally demanding. As another solution,
Considering the constraint 0
f ðxk Þ dxk ¼ 1, f(xk, hk)
we consider the following well-known approximation of the
can be approximated as
Bessel function:
1 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
f ðxk ; hk Þ  f ðxk Þ I 0 ðxÞ  ð1= 2pxÞ expðxÞ: ð27Þ
2p
!
8xk 4 Again, using (Gradshteyn and Ryzhik, 2000,
¼ 3 exp  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk ; 0 6 hk
p kx ðkÞ p kx ðkÞ Thm.3.462.1) and (Abramowitz and Stegun, 1964), this
results in
< 2p; xk P 0: ð21Þ 0 11
1 Cðb þ 32ÞDðbþ3Þ ðP k Þ b
Substituting (5) and (21) into (4) yields b k ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi @
X  2 A  Y k; ð28Þ
2ck C 32 Dð3Þ ðP k Þ
2R  
 3b1 2
1 bþ1  pffiffi 
x exp  1
x 2
 p 4ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
x k I 2xk Y k
0 kd ðkÞ dxk pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
6 0 k kd ðkÞ k p kx ðkÞ 7 where P k , 2p2ffiffiffi
 2ck .
b 6
Xk ¼ 4  
 7: p nk
R1 5
2x Y
0
xk exp  k ðkÞ xk  pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi xk I 0 k ðkÞ dxk
1 2 4 k k Eq. (28) now presents an improved low-complexity ver-
d p kx ðkÞ d
sion of the proposed estimator (which is referred to as the
ð22Þ b-order ImpLapMMSE). Finally, the clean speech compo-
nent is obtained using the inverse STFT and the weighted
Since there is yet no closed form solution for these integrals
overlap-add method.
(nominator and denominator of (22)), we suggest the fol-
To check the suitability of the utilized approximations of
lowing approximations for the Bessel function to reach a the Bessel function, in Fig. 1 the values of the these approx-
closed form low-complexity estimator.
imations ((23) and (27)) have been compared with the exact
values of Bessel function, I0(x), in the range of 0 < x < 15.
3.2. Approximation of the Bessel function For the case of approximation (23), we have considered
M = 40. To be easily comparable, the values have been
To reach a closed form solution for (22), we first pro- drawn for 0 < x < 5, 5 < x < 10, and 10 < x < 15, sepa-
pose the use of Taylor series expansion of I0(.) around rately. As seen in Fig. 1, in the case of small values of x
x = 0, i.e. (say 0 < x < 5), (23) presents a more adequate approxima-
X
M 1 tion (at the cost of higher computational load); for x > 5,
2m 2 both (23) and (27) are acceptable approximations of Bessel
I 0 ðx; MÞ  ðx=2Þ ð1=m!Þ : ð23Þ
m¼0 function.
 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101 97

(a) (b) 5
x 10 (c)
30 3000 3.5
Bessel(x)
approximation (equation (23))
3 (approximation equation (27))
25 2500

2.5
20 2000
Bessel(x)

Bessel(x)

Bessel(x)
2
15 1500
1.5

10 1000
1

5 500 0.5

0 0 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 11 12 13 14 15
x x x

Fig. 1. Comparative plot of exact Bessel function and the utilized approximations ((23) and (27)) for the range of (a) 0 < x < 5, (b) 5 < x < 10, and (c)
10 < x < 15.

4. Implementation and performance evaluation
To evaluate the performance of the proposed estimator
(b-order ImpLapMMSE), we have compared its perfor-
mance with those for MMSE-STSA (Ephraim and
Malah, 1984), b-order MMSE (You et al., 2005), and our
recently proposed one, ImpLapMMSE (Rashidinejad
et al., 2010). Unlike the first two reference methods
(Ephraim and Malah, 1984; You et al., 2005) that consider
Gaussian pdf for speech, ImpLapMMSE and b-order
ImpLapMMSE assume Laplacian priors.
For simulation, twenty (clean) speech signals (sampled
at 16 kHz) were selected randomly from the TIMIT data-
base (Garofolo et al., 1993) (10 male speakers, 10 female
speakers). In accordance with the two main references
(Chen and Loizou, 2007; You et al., 2005), in the first set
of the experiments, we corrupted the speech signals with
white Gaussian noise as well as F-16 cockpit noise from
Noisex database (Varga and Steeneken, 1993), covering a
wide range of input SNRs (10 dB, 5 dB, 2 dB, 0 dB,
5 dB, and 10 dB). The noise signals were sampled at
16 kHz. In all the experiments, 15 ms, 50% overlapped
Hamming windows were employed. To estimate the noise
Power Spectral Density (PSD), we utilized bias compen-
sated MMSE-based method that has been proposed in
(Gerkmann and Hendriks, 2012). The ‘decision-directed’
approach (Ephraim and Malah, 1984) was used to compute
the a priori SNR, nk, with a = 0.98.
Similar to You et al. (2005), in our simulations, the
value of b (in Eq. (28)) was adapted in each frame as a
function of the frame SNR, N(l), which is defined as
PðN =2Þ1 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 2
k¼0 jjRk ðlÞj  kd ðl; kÞj
NðlÞ ¼ 10log10 PðN =2Þ1 ; ð29Þ
k¼0 kd ðl; kÞ
and N is the frame length. Based on the performance anal-
ysis of b-order MMSE estimator, You et al. (2005) pro-
posed the following formula for the value of b in the l-th
frame:
bðlÞ ¼ l1 NðlÞ þ l2 ; ð30Þ
where l1 and l2 are two linear coefficients. It has been seen
that this linear relationship between b and N(l) can help to
preserve weak speech spectral components in strong speech
frames. Actually, (30) is an empirical formula with param-
eters l1 and l2 that are obtained from simulation experi-
ments. In addition to adapting b based on frame SNR,
the value of b is also limited to a maximum value of 4. This
is because too high b values will leave most of the noise
components intact. So, the final b value can be expressed
by (You et al., 2005)

Table 1
Comparative performance, in terms of Segmental SNR, of the Gaussian-based MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE,
and Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of White and F-16 noises.
Estimator White noise input SNR (dB) F-16 noise input SNR (dB)
10 5 2 0 5 10 10 5 2 0 5 10
Noisy signal (Input) 9.5 8.5 7.6 6.5 4.5 3.0 8.4 7.3 6.1 5.3 4.1 3.0
MMSE-STSA 4.7 4.1 3.4 2.9 1.7 0.5 4.5 3.7 3.2 2.5 1.2 0.9
b-order MMSE 4.4 3.6 3.1 2.5 1.2 0.8 4.1 3.1 2.6 2.1 0.9 1.1
ImpLapMMSE 3.9 2.8 2.2 1.7 0.8 1.1 3.5 2.0 1.7 1.1 0.6 1.6
b-order ImpLapMMSE 3.1 2.2 1.1 0.3 0.9 2.4 2.8 1.7 0.9 0.1 1.1 2.6
98 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101

Table 2
Comparative performance, in terms of PESQ of the Gaussian-based MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE, and Beta-
order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of White and F-16 noises.
Estimator White noise input SNR (dB) F-16 noise input SNR (dB)
10 5 2 0 5 10 10 5 2 0 5 10
Noisy signal (Input) 0.8 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.5 1.9 1.0 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.7 2.2
MMSE-STSA 1.0 1.3 1.5 1.7 2.2 2.5 1.1 1.5 1.8 1.9 2.3 2.6
b-order MMSE 1.1 1.4 1.6 1.8 2.3 2.5 1.2 1.6 1.8 2.0 2.3 2.6
ImpLapMMSE 1.2 1.4 1.7 1.9 2.4 2.7 1.3 1.8 2.0 2.1 2.4 2.7
b-order ImpLapMMSE 1.5 1.6 2.0 2.2 2.5 2.9 1.6 1.9 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.9

Table 3
Comparative performance, in terms of LLR of the Gaussian-based MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE, and Beta-
order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of White and F-16 noises.
Estimator White noise input SNR (dB) F-16 noise input SNR (dB)
10 5 2 0 5 10 10 5 2 0 5 10
Noisy signal (Input) 3.3 3.1 2.9 2.8 2.6 2.3 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.1
MMSE-STSA 3.1 2.7 2.6 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.5 1.3 1.2 1.1 1.0 0.9
b-order MMSE 2.9 2.6 2.5 2.4 2.2 2.0 1.5 1.3 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.0
ImpLapMMSE 2.8 2.5 2.4 2.3 2.2 1.9 1.4 1.2 1.1 1.0 0.9 0.8
b-order ImpLapMMSE 2.6 2.3 2.1 1.9 1.8 1.6 1.2 0.9 0.8 0.8 0.7 0.6

Table 4 Table 5
Comparative performance, in terms of Segmental SNR, of the Gaussian- Comparative performance, in terms of PESQ of the Gaussian-based
based MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLa- MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE,
pMMSE, and Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of Babble and Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of Babble and Pink
and Pink noises. noises.
Estimator Babble noise input Pink noise input SNR Estimator Babble noise input Pink noise input SNR
SNR (dB) (dB) SNR (dB) (dB)
10 0 10 10 0 10 10 0 10 10 0 10
Noisy signal (Input) 9.1 6.1 1.6 8.6 5.5 1.1 Noisy signal (Input) 1.0 1.4 2.1 0.8 1.3 2.1
MMSE-STSA 7.1 3.9 0.2 5.1 1.8 1.2 MMSE-STSA 1.2 1.6 2.4 1.2 2.1 2.8
b-order MMSE 6.8 3.5 0.5 4.9 1.7 1.4 b-order MMSE 1.3 1.7 2.4 1.2 2.2 2.9
ImpLapMMSE 5.9 3.1 0.9 4.6 1.4 1.8 ImpLapMMSE 1.4 1.7 2.5 1.3 2.3 3.0
b-order ImpLapMMSE 5.1 2.7 1.9 3.7 1.1 2.1 b-order ImpLapMMSE 1.5 1.8 2.6 1.4 2.4 3.1

bðlÞ ¼ max fmin ½l1 NðlÞ þ l2 ; l3 ; l4 g: ð31Þ Table 6

Comparative performance, in terms of LLR of the Gaussian-based
In our simulations, similar to You et al. (2005) work, we set
MMSE-STSA, Beta-order MMSE, and Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE,
l1 = 0.25, l2 = 1.75, l3 = 4, and l4 = 0.001. and Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimators in the case of Babble and Pink
To evaluate the performance of the estimators in speech noises.
enhancement task, we have used three common objective Estimator Babble noise input Pink noise input SNR
measures for speech quality: SegSNR, PESQ, and LLR. SNR (dB) (dB)
These measures have been selected based on their consider- 10 0 10 10 0 10
able correlation with the subjective quality assessments (Hu
Noisy signal (Input) 1.6 1.3 1.1 1.7 1.3 1.0
and Loizou, 2008). In the SegSNR measurement, we com- MMSE-STSA 1.5 1.3 0.9 1.4 1.0 0.7
pute the SNR of each frame of the test (noisy/processed) b-order MMSE 1.5 1.2 0.8 1.4 0.9 0.7
signal and then average over all frames. The LLR measure ImpLapMMSE 1.4 1.2 0.8 1.3 0.8 0.6
for each frame of test signal is defined as b-order ImpLapMMSE 1.4 1.1 0.8 1.3 0.7 0.6
 T 
at Rs at
LLR ¼ log T ; ð32Þ
as R s as
computed by averaging frame LLRs across all frames.
where as is the Linear Prediction Coefficient (LPC) vector PESQ is an objective measure that predicts the subjective
of the original speech frame, at is the LPC vector of the test Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for the given test signal. The
speech frame, and Rs is the autocorrelation matrix of the PESQ score is mapped to a MOS-like scale in the range
original (clean) speech signal. The mean LLR value is of 0.5 to 4.5. The superior performance (greater noise
 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101 99

Fig. 2. Comparison the effect of frame length: Comparative performance, in terms of (a) Segmental SNR, (b) PESQ, and (c) LLR of the Gaussian-based
Beta-order MMSE and Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimators at the frame lengths of 15 ms and 30 ms.

Fig. 3. Sample spectrograms of: (a) clean speech signal (TIMIT sentences “Big dogs can be dangerous. The shop closes for launch.” uttered by a male
speaker), (b) noisy signal (white Gaussian noise, 0 dB), (c) the output of Gaussian-based MMSE-STSA estimator, (d) the output of Gaussian-based Beta-
order MMSE estimator, (e) the output of Laplacian-based ImpLapMMSE estimator, and (f) the output of Beta-order ImpLapMMSE estimator.

reduction, improved speech quality, and less speech distor-
tion) can be interpreted from higher SegSNR and PESQ,
and lower LLR values.
The evaluation results for the case of white Gaussian
noise and F-16 noise have been listed in Tables 1–3 in terms
of SegSNR, PESQ and LLR, respectively. The reported
values are the averages over twenty input signals. The best
value in each column has been highlighted in bold case. As
shown, the Laplacian-based estimators (ImpLapMMSE
and b-order ImpLapMMSE) have produced superior out-
put signals compared to the Gaussian-based estimators
(MMSE and b-order MMSE).
100 H.R. Abutalebi, M. Rashidinejad / Speech Communication 67 (2015) 92–101
To extend our evaluations on the other noise types, in
the second set of the experiments we repeated our tests
on the speech signals degraded by babble and pink noises
from Noisex database (Varga and Steeneken, 1993), at
three input SNRs (10 dB, 0 dB, and 10 dB). The results
have been presented in Tables 4–6 in terms of SegSNR,
PESQ, and LLR, respectively.
As seen in Tables 1–6, the proposed estimator (b-order
ImpLapMMSE) has consistently resulted in higher Seg-
SNR, lower LLR, and higher PESQ values in all cases of
white, F-16, babble, and pink noises. The results show that
for both high and low input SNRs, the proposed b-order
ImpLapMMSE estimator yields superior performance in
noise reduction, demonstrating the efficiency of Laplacian
assumption for speech priors.
As mentioned in Section 1, the suitability of Gaussian or
Laplacian distributions for the modeling of real and imagi-
nary parts of speech DFT samples depends on the duration
of analysis frames (or the DFT size). So, it is informative to
examine the effect of the frame size on the performance of
Gaussian- and Laplacian-based estimators. To this end, in
the next set of experiments, we compared the performance
of b-order MMSE and b-order ImpLapMMSE estimators
in the cases of 15 ms and 30 ms frames. The tests were done
on the speech signals corrupted by white Gaussian noise. As
it is shown in Fig. 2, b-order ImpLapMMSE estimator has
superior performance than b-order MMSE estimator in
both 15 ms and 30 ms frames. Also, our tests show that in
the case of 15 ms frames, the outputs are slightly better than
those in the case of 30 ms frame.
To further analyze the performance the estimators, we
have provided sample spectrograms in Fig. 3. This figure
shows the spectrograms of the sample output signals of
MMSE-STSA (Ephraim and Malah, 1984), b-order MMSE
(You et al., 2005), ImpLapMMSE (Rashidinejad et al.,
2010) and the proposed b-order ImpLapMMSE estimators
along with those for the clean and noisy signals. The clean
signal has been the TIMIT sentences “Big dogs can be dan-
gerous. The shop closes for launch.” uttered by a male
speaker. The noisy signal has been produced by adding
the white Gaussian noise to the clean signal at SNR of
0 dB. As can be seen, the outputs of the Laplacian-based
estimators (ImpLapMMSE and b-order ImpLapMMSE)
have less residual noise.
Furthermore, we validated the comparative results
through some informal listening tests done by five listeners.
These tests show that the b-order ImpLapMMSE estimator
produces lower residual noise than the state-of-the-art
estimators.
5. Summary and conclusion
In this paper, we focus on speech enhancement using b-
order STSA MMSE estimator where the real and imaginary
parts of clean speech DFT coefficients are modeled by a
Laplacian prior. The resulting analytical solution is highly
complex. So, considering some approximations for joint
pdf as well as the Bessel function, we derive b-order ImpLa-
pMMSE estimator. Comparing the proposed method with
alternative state-of-the-art approaches (namely, MMSE
STSA, b-order STSA, and ImpLapMMSE) shows that
the proposed estimator is more effective in reducing additive
noise. Also, similar to what reported in (Chen and Loizou,
2005), the proposed b-order ImpLapMMSE estimator has
less residual noise, less distortion speech signal and finally
better performance in results.
It should be mentioned that the parameters of b-adapta-
tion formula and other parameters of the proposed method
have been empirically set based on experimental results.
Certainly, by choosing a more appropriate function for
b-adaptation and/or extending the experiments for param-
eter setting, the outputs of the b-order estimator can be
improved more.
Motivated by previous experiences with b-order estima-
tors (Abutalebi and Dashtbozorg, 2011; You et al., 2005),
we are continuing this research to propose an adaptive pro-
cedure for calculating optimum value of b in each frame
and each frequency bin. We are also examining the perfor-
mance of the proposed estimators in the problem of speech
de-reverberation. Derivation of MMSE (or b-order
MMSE) STSA estimator under other non-Gaussian priors
can be another trend for future works.
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