Voice Activity Detection for Speech Enhancement Applications

This paper describes a study of noise-robust voice activity detection (VAD) utilizing the periodicity of the signal, full band signal energy and high band to low band signal energy ratio. Conventional VADs are sensitive to a variably noisy environment especially with low SNR, and also result in cutt...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: E. Verteletskaya, K. Sakhnov
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: CTU Central Library 2010-01-01
Series:Acta Polytechnica
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ojs.cvut.cz/ojs/index.php/ap/article/view/1251
Description
Summary:This paper describes a study of noise-robust voice activity detection (VAD) utilizing the periodicity of the signal, full band signal energy and high band to low band signal energy ratio. Conventional VADs are sensitive to a variably noisy environment especially with low SNR, and also result in cutting off unvoiced regions of speech as well as random oscillating of output VAD decisions. To overcome these problems, the proposed algorithm first identifies voiced regions of speech and then differentiates unvoiced regions from silence or background noise using the energy ratio and total signal energy. The performance of the proposed VAD algorithm is tested on real speech signals. Comparisons confirm that the proposed VAD algorithm outperforms the conventional VAD algorithms, especially in the presence of background noise.
ISSN:1210-2709
1805-2363