Long-Term SNR Estimation of Speech Signals in Known and Unknown Channel Conditions.

Many speech processing algorithms and applications rely on the explicit knowledge of signal-to-noise ratio SNR in their design and implementation. Estimating the SNR of a signal can enhance the performance of such technologies. We propose a novel method for estimating the long-term SNR of speech signals based on features, from which we can approximately detect regions of speech presence in a noisy signal. By measuring the energy in these regions, we create sets of energy ratios, from which we train regression models for different types of noise. If the type of noise that corrupts a signal is known, we use the corresponding regression model to estimate the SNR. When the noise is unknown, we use a deep neural network to find the “closest” regression model to estimate the SNR. Evaluations were done based on the TIMIT speech corpus, using noises from the NOISEX-92 noise database. Furthermore, we performed cross-corpora experiments by training on TIMIT and NOISEX-92 and testing on the Wall Street Journal speech corpus and DEMAND noise database. Our results show that our system provides accurate SNR estimations across different noise types, corpora, and that it outperforms other SNR estimation methods.