Review: Noise Reduction Techniques for Enhancing Speech

Abstract

Speech is a signal produced by humans to interact and communicate. Different information is gained from speech signals, such as the language being spoken, emotion, gender, speaker identification, and other information. Speech signals are exposed to different noises, which can be generated at the beginning of the speech or during the transmission. Due to this problem, noise reduction processes are an interesting field in different communication application systems that cultivate the intelligibility and quality of speech signals. It refers to removing or reducing the background noise in order to obtain an improved quality of the original speech signal without distorting the original (clean) signal. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art research, reviewing different speech enhancement filters and algorithms and comparing their performance to reach a conclusion about which is the best filter or the most effective one based on the kind of noise that was used and the most difficult noise to remove from the signal.