F0-based Gammatone Filtering for Intelligibility Gain of Acoustic Noisy Signals

Abstract: This paper proposes a time-domain method to improve speech intelligibility in noisy scenarios. In the proposed approach, a series of Gammatone filters are adopted to detect the harmonic components of speech. The filters outputs are amplified to emphasize the first harmonics, reducing the masking effects of acoustic noises. The proposed GTFF0 solution and two baseline techniques are examined considering four background noises with different non-stationarity degrees. Three intelligibility measures (ESTOI, ESII and ASIIST) are adopted for objective evaluation. The experiments results show that the proposed scheme leads to expressive speech intelligibility gain when compared to the competing approaches. Furthermore, the PESQ and WSS objective scores demonstrate that the proposed technique also provides interesting quality improvement.