2009 Second Asia-Pacific Conference on Computational Intelligence and Industrial Applications
Quantum BP Neural Network for Speech
Enhancement
Fei Li
Institue of Signal Processing and Transmission
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Nanjing, China
e-mail: lifei@njupt.edu.cn
Abstract-Quantum Neural Network (QNN), a burgeoning
new field which integrates quantum computation with classical
neural network, can improve the inadequacies of artificial neural
network. A model of quantum neuron and Quantum Back
Propagation (BP) Neural Network based on quantum neuron are
investigated. A novel approach toward speech enhancement
which adopts Quantum BP Neural Network is proposed. The
numerical simulation results show that the proposed speech
enhancement scheme resulted in better performance than
traditional spectral subtraction, Wiener filtering method and
RBF neural network.
Keywords-Quantum Computation; Quantum Neural Network;
Back Propagation; Speech Enhancement
I. INTRODUCTION
There are many speech enhancement algorithms, such as
wavelet decomposition, spectral subtraction, Wiener filtering
and neural network (NN), etc. Speech enhancement based on
neural network is one of research hotspots within current
speech enhancement domain [1].
Neural Network has some attractive features such as large-
scale parallel processing, fault tolerance, self-organization, self-
adjustment and association, etc [2]. However, NN also faces
many difficulties including the absence of rules for determining
optimal architectures, limited memory capacity, time-
consuming training, catastrophic forgetting due to the pattern
interference etc.
In the field of NN, some pioneers introduced quantum
computation into analogous discussion such as quantum neural
computing, quantum-inspired neural network and quantum
associative memory [3-5]. They constructed the foundation for
further study of quantum computation in NN. From this
scenario, emerge the field of neural network based on quantum
theoretical concepts and techniques. They are called Quantum
Neural Network (QNN).
Quantum neural network (QNN) is a burgeoning new field
which integrates classical NN with quantum computing. It can
be justified both by the potential of combining their benefits
and also to eliminate some their inherent shortcomings. QNN
978-1-4244-4607-0/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE
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Guobiao Xu
Network Maintenance Division ofHuai'an Branch
Jiangsu Mobile Communications Corporation
Huai'an, China
e-mail: xuguobia0397@163.com
give us some advantages unattainable by classical artificial NN
such as exponential memory capacity, higher performance for
lower number of hidden neurons, faster learning, etc [6]. These
potential advantages of QNN are indeed compelling motivation
for their development. Some authors proposed the approach
toward speech signal processing which adopts QNN [7-8].
In this paper, a novel speech enhancement algorithm based
on Quantum BP Neural Network is proposed and its
performance is evaluated. The rest of this paper is organized as:
In Section II we shortly review the basic notations of quantum
computing. In Section III we describe the mechanism of
quantum neuron and Quantum BP Neural Network. In Section
IV the proposed speech enhancement based on Quantum BP
Neural Network is introduced and the numerical simulation
results are discussed. Finally, we give conclusions in Section V.
II. FOUNDATION OF QUANTUM COMPUTING
A. Quantum Bit
The smallest unit of information stored in a two-state
quantum computer is called a quantum bit or qubit. A qubit is a
unit vector in the two-dimensional Hilbert complex vector
space for which a particular basis, denoted by {IO>,/l>}, has
been fixed. The orthonormal basis {IO>,ll>} can be expressed
as {(I, O)T, (0, I)T}. For the purposes of quantum computation,
the basis states 10> and 11> are taken to represent the classical
bit values 0 and 1 respectively. Unlike the classical bit however,
a qubit can be in a superposition of 10> and 11> such as [9]:
(1)
where a and b are complex numbers called probability
amplitude. That is, if such a superposition is measured with
respect to the basis {IO>,11>}, the probability that the measured
value is 10> is lal 2 and the probability that the measured value is
2
11> is Ib1 , and
(2)
PACIIA 2009
B. Quantum Gates III. Q UANTUM BP N EURAL N ETWORK

Unlike the classical digital logical gates, the quantum gates
generally act on a superposition of digital states such as (1).
Through the single bit rotation gate as shown in Fig. 1, the state
of one qubit is rotated to B angle. The two-bit controlled NOT
gate performs XOR operation, as in Fig.2. It follows that if
quantum bit ' a' is 10>, quantum bit ' b' is output keeping its
input, while if quantum bit 'a' is 11>, quantum bit 'b ' is
reversed (through NOT operation) its input state and then
output.
A. Quantun Neuron
Quantum neuron can be composed of quantum gates, as in
Fig.3. The two basal quantum logical gates are included in this
quantum neuron model and complete the complex operation of
the input quantum state. The connection between the neuron
states and the quantum states is made as follows: firing neuron
state is defined as qubit state II>, non-firing neuron state is
defined as qubit state 10>, and the arbitrary neuron state is the
coherent superposition of the two.

- 0 1---
Figure I. One-bit Rotation Gate

a
1-----'<----1 o

b + l---- a ffi b
Figure 3. Quantum Neuron Model

Essentially, the amplitude and phase of quantum state are

handled respectively. The activation function of quantum
Figure 2. Two-bit Controlled NOT Gate
neuron is expressed as [II]:
It had been proved that quantum gate is constructed by
connecting the single bit rotation gate shown Fig.I to the two-
». = *f(B/,k ).f(I/) (6)
bit controlled NOT gate shown Fig.2. a EB b This means that
these two gates are fundamental to construct a quantum logic
gate [10]. Yk = JT g(Ak)-arg(u k) (7)
2
For the sake of convenient application, a quantum state may
also be expressed by its phase in the planar quantum system .
o, ==f(Yk) (8)
The expression of mathematics is used as the quantum state Herej{x) is the same function as (3) and g(x) is the sigmoid
IlfIo) in (3). function.

feB) = eiO = cosB+isinB (3) g(x) = I (9)

I +exp(-x)
which the probabilistic amplitude of'[O> corresponds to the real
B is phase variable and A is phase controlled factor , they
part and 11>, the imaginary part, where i is imaginary unit
are the two parameters to control the neuron and correspond to
..r:I and B is the phase. phase of the rotation gate and the reversal rate of the control-
Not gate respectively.
In accordance with expression of quantum state the rotation
gate and the control-NOT gate are described. The rotation gate B. 3-Layer Quantum BP Neural Network
is presented as follows, Based on the quantum neuron shown in Fig.3, we can
construct a Quantum Back Propagation (BP) Neural Network.
(4) The structure of Quantum BP Neural Network is shown in
FigA. This structure is three layered feed-forward network on
And the controlled-not gate may also be defined as [11],
the basis offeed-forward artificial neural network model. There
are L input nodes , K hidden layer nodes and M output nodes.
f ( -JT y - B)_{sinB+icosB,
- (Y=I)} (5) All the neurons of Quantum BP Neural Network are quantum
2 cosB-isinB, (y=O)
neurons.
where r is the control variable, r =1 implies the reversal
and r =0 means the non-reversal.

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 spectral subtraction based speech enhancement, the improved
wiener filter based speech enhancement, RBF neural network
based speech enhancement and our Quantum BP Neural
Network based speech enhancement. We evaluate speech by
measuring Mel Cepstral Distance (MCD) Distortion [12]. The
experiment results are given in Table 1.
According to the experiment results, Mel Cepstral
Distance of enhanced speech, which are largely improved
compared with the former ones, are very small. The Mel
Cepstral Distance of enhanced speech by Quantum BP
Neural Network is the smallest, which means the proposed
Quantum BP Neural Network based speech enhancement
outperforms the others.

Figure 4. 3-Layer Feed Forward Network TABLE I. EXPERIMENTALRESULTS

SNR
-9.38 I8 -2.2508 3.7698 10.2142 15.3654
IV. EXPERIMENTS ON SPEECH ENHANCEMENT Before (db)
Denoise
In order to evaluate the performance of Quantum BP Neural MCD 49.6986 43.5414 35.8599 26.5884 19.5445
Network in speech enhancement, several experiments Spectral
45.7490 38.6650 30.5975 23.2445 18.5737
compared with traditional methods were conducted. This Subtraction
section presents the tasks and the results. Improved
10.6173 8.4638 6.7859 5.0816 3.8858
Wiener Filter
A. Experimental Methods RBF Neural
7.104 5.4518 4.2969 3.2707 2.3746
Networ k
The structure of the proposed speech enhancement scheme Quantum BP
based on Quantum BP Neural Network is depicted in Fig.5. 5.2119 3.7565 2.8016 1.9992 1.4610
Neural Network
Make use of three layer feed-forward quantum BP neural
network to denoise. The Quantum BP Neural Network has 256 The time-domain graphs and spectrum maps of the
quantum neurons of input layer, 200 quantum neurons of enhanced speech by spectral subtraction, improved wiener
hidden layer and 256 quantum neurons of output layer (256- filter, RBF neural network and Quantum BP Neural Network
200-256 can be expressed as ). are depicted in Fig.6 and Fig.7 respectively. Obviously, the
enhanced speech signals by the proposed Quantum BP
Neural Network based speech enhancement is nearest to pure
speech signals.
Recen-
Quantum BP Pure Speech Signal Noisy Speec h Signal(SNR=3 .7698dB)
structed
NeurnlNetwor
speech

15
4
X 10
Spectral Subtraction
Figure 5. Speech Enhancement Based On Quantum BP Neural Network
.,
"0
~
Experiments have been conducted on ' 863 Speech C.
E
Database' collected by the Center for Speech Signal Processing '"
of NUPT. The pure speech signal was randomly divided into t X 104 X
4
10
two sets which length are respectively about five minutes. One RBF Network Quantum BP Network

set is used for training the network and another is used for
evaluation.
B. Experiment results
Novel experiments have been designed for in depth studies
of applying the Quantum BP Neural Network to speech Figure 6. Time-domain graphs
enhancement. The speech signals are generated by adding
mixed noises (including: white noise, pink noise, brown noise,
high frequency channel noise, etc.) into pure speech.
For comparison, evaluations were also done for classical
NN and other methods. We report the experiments of the

391
 Noisy Speech Signal(SNR=3 .7698dB)
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Foundation for the Doctoral Program of the Ministry of
Education of China under Grant No. 2006029300 I.

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